Complete works of willia.., p.831
Complete Works of William Morris, page 831
“You see as to all these matters I do the books mainly for you and one or two others; the public does not really care about them a damn — which is stale. But I tell you I want you to have them, and finally you shall.
“Yours affectionately,
“WILLIAM MORRIS.”
The autumn at Kelmscott was unusually quiet and happy. A certain degree of physical feebleness had now become his normal condition; he was seldom able to take long walks, or to spend whole days fishing; but he delighted in driving among the beautiful and familiar villages, and in shorter walks near home. It was on one of these walks, at the end of September, that when his companions perched on a gate to rest he sat down on the roadside with his legs straight out in front of him, saying, “I shall sit on the world.” It would be difficult to convey to any one who did not know him well the sense of mingled oddness and pathos that the words gave. Two days later, on a Sunday morning in Buscot Wood, he talked for some two hours on end on the principles of conducting business, with all his old keen insight and fertility of illustration. It was noticeable how he seemed to speak of the whole matter as, for himself, a past experience. One of the visitors at Kelmscott that week was Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s little grandson, in whose favour Morris discarded any prejudices which he might have against children other than his own; for outside of his own family he was not a lover of children, and seldom took any notice of them. “As to Denis, he is the dearest little chap,” he writes on the 3rd of October, “and as merry as the day is long — all that a gentleman of his age should be: everybody paid him the attention which he deserves.” The Kelmscott holiday — during which, however, he was steadily at work designing borders and initials for the Chaucer — was prolonged till the beginning of November.
Soon after he returned to London the first elections were being held under the Local Government Act of 1894, which had been the latest and the most important achievement of Mr. Gladstone’s administration. Morris was at once too preoccupied with his own work, and too disillusioned by his own experience, to feel any very deep interest in the matter. He did not go to Kelmscott to attend the inaugural parish meeting: in London he voted, but did no more. It was claimed for the Act by some enthusiasts that it reconstituted a framework of administration which was essentially that of the Middle Ages, and indeed went back in some points even beyond them. But to him it seemed too artificial, and too much encumbered with those checks and balances which he hated, to be a source of any great hope. To Lady Burne-Jones, who was standing for selection to the Parish Council at Rottingdean, he wrote on the 14th of December:
“Well now, I hope you will come in at the head of the poll; and I hope we shall beat our Bumbles. No one here can even guess how it will go. I daresay you think me rather lukewarm about the affair; but I am so depressed with the pettiness and timidity of the bill and the checks and counterchecks with which such an obvious measure has been hedged about, that all I can hope is that people will be able to keep up the excitement about it till they have got it altered somewhat. However, I shall go and vote for my twelve tomorrow morning, but I am lethargic and faint-hearted.”
A week later he wrote again: “Many thanks for your book “ — a brief, but admirably lucid printed address to the electors, explaining the scope of the Act and the nature of their rights and duties under it— “which is as good as the subject admits of, and for the first time makes me know something about the parish councils. Could you let me have two or three more? Now I congratulate you on the election, and I am really quite pleased that you beat the Bumbles. Here they beat us properly; though I didn’t think, all things considered, that it was so bad, as we polled about half of what they did. You see all through London the middle class voted solid against us; which I think extremely stupid of them, as they might as well have got credit for supporting an improved administration. But you see they have an instinct, which they can’t resist, against any progress in any direction. Item, they are very fearful lest the rates should be raised on them; as they certainly will be, whoever is in. We did better with the Guardians’ election, getting eight out of twelve.”
At the beginning of 1895 Morris was carrying on all his multifarious occupations with unimpaired activity. Two presses were at work upon the Chaucer, and a third on smaller books. He was designing new paper-hangings; he was going on daily with the writing of new romances; he was completing, in collaboration with Mr. Magnússon, the translation of the Heimskringla which they had begun some three and twenty years before, and seeing it through the press for the Saga Library; and he was busily increasing the collection of illuminated manuscripts, chiefly of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which towards the end of his life became his chief treasures and gave him extraordinary delight. With the two presses at work it now seemed possible to finish the Chaucer in a year, and the panics into which he sometimes fell over its slow progress were greatly allayed. Among the smaller books which the third printing-press was turning out was the volume of selected poems of Coleridge. As to that book the following interesting passage occurs in a letter to Ellis when the contents were under discussion :
“As to the Coleridge-Keats question, you don’t quite understand the position I think. Keats was a great poet who sometimes nodded: we don’t want to make a selection of his works. Coleridge was a muddle-brained metaphysician, who by some strange freak of fortune turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont. It is these real poems only that must be elected, or we burden the world with another useless book. Christabel only just comes in because the detail is fine; but nothing a hair’s breadth worse must be admitted. There is absolutely no difficulty in choosing, because the difference between his poetry and his drivel is so striking.
“I have been through the poems, and find that the only ones that have any interest for me are — I. Ancient Mariner, 2. Christabel, 3. Kubla Khan, and 4. the poem called Love. This would make a very little book, about 60 pages. There is one other which at least has some character, though rather tainted with Words-worthianism; it is called The Three Graves, and is about as cheerful as the influenza. But then it is copyright; and at the best it would rather water down the good ones.”
This volume, which finally included thirteen of Coleridge’s poems, was the last of the series of reprints of modern poetry issued from the Kelmscott Press. It was not printed till a year later, having been postponed to another volume of selected poems of Herrick, for whom Morris had only a modified liking. “I like him better than I thought I should: I daresay we shall make a pretty book of it,” was all he would say after looking through the “Hesperides” and “Noble Numbers” when the Kelmscott edition was in preparation.
In March he was buying manuscripts of Messrs. Quaritch and Leighton, and also at sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and hungering after more, though indignant at the prices which were asked for them. “I bought,” he writes to Ellis on the 19th, “for £15 IOS. (much too dear) a Guldin Bibel (Augsburg, Hohen-wang, circa 1470), a very interesting book which I much wanted. Also I bought for £25 (much too dear) a handsome 13th century French MS., but with little ornament, because it looked so handsome I hadn’t the heart to send it back. The Mentelin Bible Quaritch bought for himself: ’tis a very fine book, and I lust after it, but can’t afford it. The prices were preposterous. There is a sale at Sotheby’s this week, and I am just going up there, though I don’t expect much in my way. I expect to meet Mr. James there with the two leaves from the Fitzwilliam.”
On the 23rd he continues: “As the history of sales seems to interest you, hear a tale of the Phillips sale, of which to-day is the third day. Two books I bid for. A 13th century Aristotelian book with three very pretty initials, but imperfect top and tail; I put £15 on this with many misgivings as to my folly — hi! it fetched £50!! A really pretty little book, Gregory’s Decretals, with four or five very tiny illuminations; I took a fancy to it and put £40 on it, expecting to get it for £25 — ho!! it fetched £96!!! Rejoice with me that I have got 82 MSS., as clearly I shall never get another. I have duly got my two leaves, and beauties they are.”
The two leaves mentioned in these letters have an interesting history attached to them. In the previous July Morris had bought for upwards of £400 — the highest price he had ever then paid for a book — an English Book of Hours written about 1300 in East Anglia, and containing the arms of Grey and Clifford. It was subsequently found that two missing leaves from this manuscript were in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. After long negotiations, it was agreed that Morris should sell his book to the museum for £200, and in return have the possession of it and of the two leaves belonging to it for his own lifetime. He had the leaves inserted in their places, and the manuscript remained one of his chief treasures. After his death it went to Cambridge, where it is now.
Notwithstanding the great rise in prices, a fine painted book was always worth more to Morris than it cost: and within the next two months he had added two of the first rank to his collection. One of these was the so-called Huntingfield Psalter, a superb book of the end of the twelfth century. The other was the Tiptoft Missal, a work of about thirty years later, with illuminated borders throughout, of which the best are of unsurpassed beauty.
At the beginning of April he went down to Kelmscott. The Manor House, of which his tenure had hitherto been precarious, had, by an arrangement made the month before, passed practically, though not formally, into his ownership.
“It is just a month,” he wrote to his daughter on his arrival, “since I was here, and there is a great change in the grass, which shows green everywhere and looks beautiful. As to the flowers, there are not many of them actually out. The snowdrops nearly but not quite gone; a few purple crocuses, but of course not open this sunless day. The daphne very full of blossom. Many daffodils nearly out, but only two or three quite. The beautiful hepatica, which I used to love so when I was a quite little boy, in full bloom, both pink and blue: the hyacinths not out yet, but more advanced than our London (outdoor) ones. Several of the crown imperials show for bloom; but are not due yet, nor are the yellow tulips. There are a few primroses, but not many; but the garden with all its springing green looks lovely.
“As to birds, I have heard very little singing except the rooks, who are all agog: I suppose the cold weather has belated the breeding season.
“Giles has patched up the punt, and is sanguine about its holding water: so am I; but think the water may be rather inside than out — however we shall see. There has been a little flood since I was here; which will do good. The house is as clean as a new pin.”
By the end of the month he had cleared off long arrears of translation and romance-writing by finishing his Heimskringla and the romance of “The Water of the Wondrous Isles,” and was working harder than ever for the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings. The main object of their defence at the moment was Peterborough Cathedral.
It was one of the churches which had been his earliest admirations; he had known it in his boyhood, and felt towards it as though he had been one of its own builders. One of the most brilliant pieces of imaginative description in “The Earthly Paradise “ is put in the mouth of a wanderer who had seen that magnificent western front rising. It occurs in the introductory verses to the tale of “The Proud King.”
— I, who have seenSo many lands, and midst such marvels been,
Clearer than these abodes of outland men
Can see above the green and unburnt fen
The little houses of an English town,
Cross-timbered, thatched with fen-reeds coarse and brown,
And high o’er these, three gables, great and fair,
That slender rods of columns do upbear
Over the minster doors, and imagery
Of kings, and flowers no summer field doth see,
Wrought on those gables. Yea, I heard withal
In the fresh morning air, the trowels fall
Upon the stone, a thin noise far away;
For high up wrought the masons on that day,
Since to the monks that house seemed scarcely well
Till they had set a spire or pinnacle
Each side the great porch. . . . I am now grown old,
Yet is it still the tale I then heard told
Within the guest-house of that minster-close
Whose walls, like cliffs new-made, before us rose.
A long and bitter controversy was carried on between the Dean and Chapter on one side and the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings on the other. It ended inconclusively; and the work proposed by Mr. Pearson has in the main been carried out. But here as elsewhere the real result of the Society’s action is to be sought, not so much in what they failed to prevent, as in the effect which their vigilant and jealous criticism had on the manner in which the work was carried out.
Equally strong was Morris’ feeling in another matter on which that same spring he helped to excite public interest, that of the injuries done to Epping Forest, the playground of his own childhood, by the Conservators. Alarm had been aroused by the amount of “restoration” that had been carried out in it for some years by lopping and felling, as well as by changes which smoothed down the characteristic wildness of the Forest. The strangely romantic aspect of the dense hornbeam thickets, the plashy dells, and the rough cattle-tracks winding among the hollies and beeches of the upper ground, had been already impaired and was in further danger: and Morris was roused to alarm and indignation by the prospect of seeing one of the last fragments of ancient England turned into a modern park. On the 7th of May he spent a long day in walking through the Forest with a party of four or five friends. He was relieved to find that the evil had been exaggerated. Here and there damage had undoubtedly been done; but whole tracts of the Forest remained as wild and beautiful as ever; and he drew little but pleasure from the visit to the glades and coppices, every yard of which had been familiar to him as a boy.
His anxieties about the Kelmscott Chaucer were not yet over. At the end of May the discovery was made that a number of the printed sheets had become discoloured, owing to some failure in the exact preparation of the ink. Fortunately it proved that the yellow stain was fugitive, and could be removed by careful bleaching in sunlight without affecting the colour of the ink. But it was not till late in the autumn that he could fully satisfy himself that the stain had been permanently removed, and might not reappear.
“The check of the Chaucer flattens life for me somewhat,” he writes on the 19th of July, “but I am going hard into the matter, and have found out the real expert in the matter of inks and oils, and in about a fortnight hope to know the worst of it.
“On Wednesday I went a journey into Suffolk for the S. P. A. B., a pretty journey all through my native Essex. The upland pastures were all burnt up, and were cocoa-nut matting; but the corn did not look bad: they were cutting oats in many places, which should not be ready till the end of August. Blythborough was what we went to see; once a good town in the Middle Ages, now a poor remnant of a village with the ruins of a small religious house and a huge 15th century church built of flint after that country manner: a very beautiful church, full of interest, with fine wood-work galore, a lovely painted roof, and some stained glass; the restorations not much noticeable from the inside: floor of various bricks, a few seats in the nave, all ancient, similar ones in the chancel, and the rest open space. We were cumbered of course with the parson, since we came to advise him, but I much enjoyed myself and sat about while Turner did his measurings, etc. The place is close to Southwold on the little tidal river Bly at the end of the marshland valley, where they were busy with their second hay crop. Little spits of the sandy low upland covered with heather and bracken run down to the marsh, and make a strange landscape of it; a mournful place, but full of character. I was there some twenty-five years ago; and found I remembered it perfectly.
“By the way, there was a review of the Wood “ — his romance of “The Wood beyond the World,” which had been issued from the Kelmscott Press the year before, and of which an ordinary edition had recently been published— “in last week’s Spectator, which was kind and polite, but amused me very much by assuming that it was a Socialist allegory of Capital and Labour! It was written with such an air of cock-certainty that I thought people might think that I had told the reviewer myself; so I wrote a note to explain that he was wrong.”
During this summer the gradual failure of Morris’ strength became clearly noticeable. Languor insensibly stole over him. “It is sad,” Sir Edward Burne-Jones wrote in autumn, “to see his enormous vitality diminishing.” He was less ready for any active expeditions, and began to suffer from sleeplessness. In summer mornings it had long been a luxury with him to be awakened at dawn by the first birds and then fall asleep again; but now that first waking was not always succeeded by a second sleep, and he often, even when summer passed into winter, got up at three or four o’clock and sat down to write at one of his prose tales in order to pass the time. He found that the clipping of a yew dragon which had been for some years in progress under the gable of the tapestry-room at Kelmscott was too fatiguing a task for him. His country walks became shorter in their range, and fishing was almost given up. “Ellis was with us for three days,” he writes at the beginning of August, “and took me fishing every day: I did not much want to go, but I daresay it did me good.” Even writing began to be a fatiguing task. “I am worn out,” he says on the 13th of August, “width writing a long letter to the Athenaeum about the tapestry at South Kensington Museum, and so cannot attempt to fill up this sheet.” A week later, however, he was well enough to make his annual expedition to the White Horse. Lady Burne-Jones, who was staying at Kelmscott, was of the party. “Topsy looks very happy, and is so sweet down here,” she wrote home. “The garden is enchanting with flowers, one mass of them, and all kept in beautiful order. The trees and bushes are of course grown in the last nine years, and the whole place is leafier; otherwise I feel as if I had been here last week, the place is so little changed — but I feel the added years in Janey and Topsy and me, so that it seems like visiting something that is not quite real.”
