Complete works of willia.., p.830
Complete Works of William Morris, page 830
This letter, headed “The Deeper Meaning of the Struggle,” and written on the 9th of November, ran as follows :
“May I be allowed to say a word in supplement to your paragraph about my opinion on the future of the fine arts? You rather imply that I am a pessimist on this matter. This is not the case; but I am anxious that there should be no illusions as to the future of art. I do not believe in the possibility of keeping art vigorously alive by the action, however energetic, of a few groups of specially gifted men and their small circle of admirers amidst a general public incapable of understanding and enjoying their work. I hold firmly to the opinion that all worthy schools of art must be in the future, as they have been in the past, the outcome of the aspirations of the people towards the beauty and true pleasure of life. And further, that now that democracy is building up a new order, which is slowly emerging from the confusion of the commercial period, these aspirations of the people towards beauty can only be born from a condition of practical equality of economical condition amongst the whole population. Lastly, I am so confident that this equality will be gained, that I am prepared to accept as a consequence of the process of that gain, the seeming disappearance of what art is now left us; because I am sure that that will be but a temporary loss, to be followed by a genuine new birth of art, which will be the spontaneous expression of the pleasure of life innate in the whole people.
“This, I say, is the art which I look forward to, not as a vague dream, but as a practical certainty, founded on the general well-being of the people. It is true that the blossom of it I shall not see; therefore I may be excused if, in common with other artists, I try to express myself through the art of to-day, which seems to us to be only a survival of the organic art of the past, in which the people shared, whatever the other drawbacks of their condition might have been. For the feeling for art in us artists is genuine, though we have to work in the midst of the ignorance of those whose whole life ought to be spent in the production of works of art (the makers of wares to wit) and of the fatuous pretence of those who, making no utilities, are driven to ‘make-believe.’
“Yet if we shall not (those of us who are as old as I am) see the New Art, the expression of the general pleasure of life, we are even now seeing the seed of it beginning to germinate. For if genuine art be impossible without the help of the useful classes, how can these turn their attention to it if they are living amidst sordid cares which press upon them day in, day out? The first step, therefore, towards the new birth of art must be a definite rise in the condition of the workers; their livelihood must (to say the least of it) be less niggardly and less precarious, and their hours of labour shorter; and this improvement must be a general one, and confirmed against the chances of the market by legislation. But again this change for the better can only be realized by the efforts of the workers themselves. ‘By us, and not for us,’ must be their motto. That they are now finding this out for themselves and acting on it makes this year a memorable one indeed, small as is the actual gain which they are claiming. So I not only ‘admit,’ but joyfully insist on the fact ‘that the miners are laying the foundation of something better.’ The struggle against the terrible power of the profit-grinder is now practically proclaimed by them a matter of principle, and no longer a mere chance-hap business dispute, and though the importance of this is acknowledged here and there, I think it is even yet underrated. For my part I look upon the swift progress towards equality as now certain; what these staunch miners have been doing in the face of such tremendous odds, other workmen can and will do; and when life is easier and fuller of pleasure, people will have time to look around them and find out what they desire in the matter of art, and will also have power to compass their desires. No one can tell now what form that art will take; but as it is certain that it will not depend on the whim of a few persons, but on the will of all, so it may be hoped that it will at last not lag behind that of past ages, but will outgo the art of the past in the degree that life will be more pleasurable from the absence of bygone violence and tyranny, in spite and not because of which our forefathers produced the wonders of popular art, some few of which time has left us.”
CHAPTER XXI. LAST YEARS: THE KELMSCOTT CHAUCER. 1894-1896
FOR about a year from the date of this remarkable letter Morris’ life was so quietly busy from day to day that it has left almost no noticeable records. At the end of 1893 he had written to his mother the last letter of the long series which begins when he was an undergraduate at Oxford.
“Kelmscott House,
“Dec. 23rd, 1893.
“My dearest Mother,
“If I do not write now I shall not be in time for Christmas Day, so please consider this as Christmas Eve. I asked Henny to get you some pocket-handkerchiefs when she was in town. I hope you found them nice. The weather here is very fine this morning; I hope the sun is shining in on your room as it is on mine, as I suppose it is, for I think they both look nearly south. Jenny (the younger) is sitting with me reading a paper, and we are both enjoying the fine day.
“I got a letter from Henny yesterday inclosing a nice neck-kerchief for me; that will be good for me to wear when the weather takes one of the sudden changes to cold, which come so often now. Thank you very much for it.
“Also, dearest mother, thank you very much for the handsome stands and dishes you were so kind as to send me; and the beautiful Dresden cups which I have always so much admired. And they are so pleasant to drink out of.
“We are all very well at present, and have pretty much got over our colds. I am looking forward to this Christmas as a quiet time, when there will be a lull in business matters: as I am hard at work, which I like very much.
“Dearest own mother, I send you my very best love and am
“Your most affectionate son,
“WILLIAM MORRIS.”
Mrs. Morris died in the following winter in her ninetieth year. “Tuesday I went to bury my mother,” he wrote a few days afterwards: “a pleasant winter day with gleams of sun. She was laid in earth in the churchyard close by the house, a very pretty place among the great wych-elms, which, if it were of no use to her, was softening to us. Altogether my old and callous heart was touched by the absence of what had been so kind to me and fond of me. She was eighty-nine, and had been ill for nearly four years.”
All that year Morris had been working hard at his press. But at Whitsuntide he took a holiday, and spent it in his favourite haunts of Northern France. He renewed there his delight in the indestructible beautiful country, and the still lovely towns which seem as if they had grown out of the country like the fruit on a tree. The spring, too, was one of exceptional beauty; the countryside was one flame of flowers, and “the nightingales,” as Morris put it to Burne-Jones after he came back, “O my wig, they were peppering into it.” The effect of the visit may be clearly traced in an address which he gave, soon after his return to England, to the Ancoats Brotherhood at Manchester. The subject he chose to speak upon was “Town and Country.” The greater part of the address was delivered without notes, and of that portion no trustworthy record has been preserved. But for the earlier portion a few pages of manuscript had been carefully written out: and the fragment is notable for the clearness of its historical view, and for the temperate practical ideal, which, not without reasonable hope, it sets up for a near future. It has also a direct autobiographic value from its personal touches, not only in the allusion to the Oxford of his own youth, but where he speaks of the havoc wrought in country villages by the wasteful neglect, or still worse by the destructive attention, of the modern landowner. In both cases he had in his mind actual instances in his own neighbourhood on the upper Thames. But beyond all, it sums up, with the ripeness of long experience, the instincts and beliefs which guided him in his view of what kind of human life was desirable, and possible, and a duty, in a naturally beautiful world.
“Town and country are generally put in a kind of contrast, but we will see what kind of a contrast there has been, is, and may be between them; how far that contrast is desirable or necessary, or whether it may not be possible in the long run to make the town a part of the country and the country a part of the towns. I think I may assume that, on the one hand, there is nobody here so abnormally made as not to take a pleasure in green fields, and trees, and rivers, and mountains, the beings, human and otherwise, that inhabit those scenes, and in a word, the general beauty and incident of nature: and that, on the other, we all of us find human intercourse necessary to us, and even the excitement of those forms of it which can only be had where large bodies of men live together.
“In the Roman times of the Empire, when the lands were cultivated almost wholly by well-organized slave labour with its necessary concomitant of brigandage and piracy in out-of-the-way places, I can’t think that the countrysides were very pleasant places to live in; whereas the Roman city with its handsome buildings and gardens, its public baths, and other institutions of almost complete ‘municipal socialism,’ must have been very pleasant to well-to-do people, and perhaps, under the Empire at least, not quite intolerable to the proletarian, whose form of pauper relief did not include the prison system of the modern workhouse. In those days the town decidedly ‘scores’; all the more as manufacture was, as its name implies, wholly a matter of handicraft. But the Roman city-system was pretty much swept away by the barbarism which took the place of the Empire. In this country, and wherever the people were not completely Romanized, the town was almost always merely the development of the agricultural district; it was the aggregation of the cultivators of the soil, and its freemen were always landowners, though mostly collective ones. In fact, for a long time after the Teutonic invasion which made this country England, there were no towns at all: the English clans lived in scattered homesteads along the side of the sea, or some river, or in clearings of the wild wood, as their Anglish, Jutish, or Saxon forefathers had done, and when they took a Romano-British town they had nothing better to do with it than to burn it and let it be: though, when they got more civilized, the long extinct glories of Rome took some revenge for this destruction, by the impression which they made on the descendants of the destroyers: e.g., an Anglo-Saxon poet of about the time of Athelstane wrote a poem on the ruins of an old Roman city which is as pathetic and beautiful as any lyric extant in any language, and you may, if you please, look on it as a forecast of the glories of the cities that were yet to come.
“gradually, as civilization grew, the population thickened in certain places where the protection of the feudal lord — Baron, Bishop, or Abbot — made a market possible; and in short the growth of such places made our mediæval towns; though, as was like to be, where an old Roman town like York or London was still in existence, it was used as such a centre. But doubtless our mediæval towns were very small, smaller than our imagination of them pictures them to us; while on the other hand, the country villages were in many cases much larger than they are now. In fact in those days it was not so much the houses that made the town, as the constitution, the freemen and the guilds, which gradually grew into the Corporation. My familiarity with Oxford makes it easy to me to see a mediaeval town of the more important kind: a place of some extent within its ancient walls, but the houses much broken by gardens and open spaces within the walls, and without them, a small estate it may be called, the communal property of the freemen. On the whole, then, the towns of the Middle Ages, in this country at least, were a part of the countrysides where they stood.
“In the Middle Ages even London was no more of a centre than Bristol or York, or indeed other places now become almost extinct. But in the eighteenth century London was become very decidedly the centre of England, and now the distinction was not between the towns and the countrysides, but between London and the rest of the country, towns and all. And here properly begins the opposition of town to country. The only further development of this was the work of the Great Industries which created the big manufacturing town, a thing so entirely modern that even London, with all its enormity, has more relation to the cities of the past than these manufacturing towns have.
“On considering further the contrast between town and country we must be careful not to forget this special quality in London. For now we see that we have three things to deal with: London, the external beastliness and sordidness of which is in some degree compensated by its intellectual life; the commercial centres, which have no such compensation, and even in externals are far more horrible than London; and the country, which, instead of being the due fellow and helpmate of the towns and the Town, is a troublesome appendage, an awkward incident of town life, which, commercial or intellectual, is the real life of our epoch.
“The result of all this is the usual make-shift jumble which oppresses all our life in this epoch of strange and rapid change, when we have fallen into such grievous want of reasonable organization. Even London, though far better than the commercial towns, is sordidly vulgar in its rich quarters, noisome and squalid beyond word in its poor quarters. And the country — at this end of May I am not going to say that it is not beautiful — beautiful everywhere more or less where there are not many modern houses in sight. But I know the country well: and even for a rich man, a well-to-do one at least, it shares in the make-shift stupidity of the epoch. Amongst all the superabundant beauty of leaf and flower, all the wealth of meadow, and acre, and hillside, it is stingy, O so stingy! In an ordinary way not an hour’s work will be spent in taking away an ugly dead tree, in mending a shattered wall, setting a tottering vane straight (even if it be pulling down the roof-beam it is fastened to), in short in mending any defacement caused by wind and weather. Not a moment’s consideration will be given as to whether the sightly material shall be used, if the unsightly one be a fraction cheaper for the time being. You can scarce have milk unless you keep a cow: you can’t have vegetables unless you grow them yourself. I say this is the ordinary rule: it is true that when there is a rich squire, he does sometimes take some pains in beautifying his cottages, restoring his church, and so forth — with the result in all cases, that the village he has so dealt with has become as vulgar as Bayswater. Nor can I leave this subject of the outward aspect of the country without reminding you that through forty years of my life I have diligently and affectionately noticed the countryside in its smallest detail, and that the change for the worse in its aspect has been steady, and, especially within the last twenty years, startlingly rapid. Indeed, sometimes I feel selfishly glad to think that I shall not live to see the worst of it. Now you may well say that all this suffering to men who are in the habit of taking in impressions through the eyes is a due reward for our living on other people’s earnings; for our suffering the human live-stock of the country to live such a wretched scanty existence as they do. True, and over true; but then why should we of the nineteenth century be so extra punished, when our forefathers were involved in the same sin?
“I take it that after all this is the case, that we feel it because it is at last tending to change — that we at last can do something to alter it. For this is what I want done in this matter of town and country: I want neither the towns to be appendages of the country, nor the country of the town; I want the town to be impregnated with the beauty of the country, and the country with the intelligence and vivid life of the town. I want every homestead to be clean, orderly, and tidy; a lovely house surrounded by acres and acres of garden. On the other hand, I want the town to be clean, orderly, and tidy; in short, a garden with beautiful houses in it. Clearly, if I don’t wish this, I must be a fool or a dullard; but I do more — I claim it as the due heritage of the latter ages of the world which have subdued nature, and can have for the asking.”
The great work of the Kelmscott Chaucer, which had been so long in preparation, was now fairly begun. “Chaucer getting on well; such lovely designs,” is a note made by him in early spring. At the end of June he writes that he hopes to begin the actual printing within a month, and that, in about three months more, all the pictures, and nearly all the borders, will be ready for the whole of the Canterbury Tales. His delight in the growing row of volumes from his own press was unabated; and almost as great was his delight in giving copies to his more intimate friends. To Mr. Philip Webb, who had made some remonstrance against the extent of his generosity, he replied in the following letter:
“Kelmscott House,
“August 27th, ‘94.
“My dear Fellow,
“A traveller once entered a western hotel in America and went up to the clerk in his box (as the custom is in that country) and ordered chicken for his dinner: the clerk, without any trouble in his face, put his hand into his desk, and drew out a derringer, wherewith he covered the newcomer and said in a calm historic voice: Stranger, you will not have chicken, you will have hash.
“This story you seem to have forgotten. So I will apply it, and say that you will have the Kelmscott books as they come out. In short you will have hash because it would upset me very much if you did not have a share in my ‘larx.’
“As to the Olaf Saga, I had forgotten what you had had; chiefly I think because I did not prize the big-paper copies much. They were done in the days of ignorance, before the Kelmscott Press was, though hard on the time when it began.
