Complete works of willia.., p.832
Complete Works of William Morris, page 832
“The garden looks rich and pleasant,” Morris himself had written at the beginning of the month, “though the autumn flowers (for we are practically in autumn now) are so much less delightful than those of spring and early summer. One pleasant walk is cut off from us at present, the one up to Buscot Wood. It is guarded by a dragon; i.e., a savage Bull; we (Jenny and I) on Friday last were just going into the first Berkshire field when the lock-keeper stopped us and told us awesome stories about the said beast; so we abstained. We, safe on the other side of the river, saw the gentleman afterwards, as he walked away from his harem, sometimes throwing up his head and bellowing, sometimes faring along with that expressive half inward growl, which is so interesting to hear when you are on the other side of the Thames. We were both of us compelled to admit that he was a gallant-looking neat — red-roan of colour.”
The lock-keeper’s cottage, a pretty but tumble-down building of grey stone, walls and roof, was about to be rebuilt by the Thames Conservancy; and one of the last instances in which Morris was able to ward off encroachments on the beauty of the riverside was when he now prevented, by a temperate and dignified expostulation, the replacement of the old silver-grey roof which lay in sight of his own house by one of blue Welsh slate. At his urgent instances, too, the Conservators consented to give instructions that the men who cut the weeds on the river should spare the flowering plants on the banks as much as possible. But beyond his own immediate reach he had to confess with despondency that it seemed useless to struggle against the pervading flood of evil change in that lovely region. “I was thinking just now,” he writes from Kelmscott at the end of August, “how I have wasted the many times when I have been ‘hurt’ and (especially of late years) have made no sign, but swallowed down my sorrow and anger, and nothing done! Whereas if I had but gone to bed and stayed there for a month or two and declined taking any part in life, as indeed on such occasions I have felt very much disinclined to do, I can’t help thinking that it might have been very effective. Perhaps you remember that this game was tried by some of my Icelandic heroes, and seemingly with great success. But I admit that it wants to be done well.
“It was a most lovely afternoon when I came down here, and I was prepared to enjoy the journey from Oxford to Lechlade very much: and so I did; but woe’s me! when we passed by the once lovely little garth near Black Bourton, I saw all my worst fears realized; for there was the little barn we saw being mended, the wall cut down and finished with a zinked iron roof. It quite sickened me when I saw it. That’s the way all things are going now. In twenty years everything will be gone in this countryside, which twenty years ago was so rich in beautiful building: and we can do nothing to help it or mend it. The world had better say, ‘Let us be through with it and see what will come after it! ‘ In the meantime I can do nothing but a little bit of Anti-Scrape — sweet to eye while seen. Now that I am grown old and see that nothing is to be done, I half wish that I had not been born with a sense of romance and beauty in this accursed age.”
But a week afterwards he had so far rallied from this fit of depression as to be in great excitement over the new scheme for the folio edition of his own “Sigurd the Volsung,” for which Burne-Jones had just agreed to design at least five and twenty pictures. “I am afire to see the new designs,” he wrote to Burne-Jones, “which I have no doubt will do — and as to the age, that be blowed!”
During the winter he still went on lecturing from time to time as his strength allowed. On the 30th of October, at the request of Mr. Hines, a Radical and Socialist chimney-sweep in Oxford, with whom he had a long-standing acquaintance, dating from the early days of the Socialist movement, he gave an address to inaugurate the newly-founded Oxford Socialist Union. A month later he spoke— “to the point and impressively,” a hearer says — at the funeral of Sergius Stepniak, in the foggy drizzle outside Waterloo Station. During December he lectured twice in London, on English architecture and on Gothic illustrations to printed books. The latter lecture, delivered at the Bolt Court Technical School, was the last he gave with his old vigour. On the 3rd of January he attended the New Year’s meeting of the Social Democratic Federation at the Holborn Town Hall, and made there a short, but noble and touching speech on behalf of unity. Two days afterwards, he gave the last of his Sunday evening lectures at Kelmscott House. The subject of the lecture was “One Socialist Party.” “Could not sleep at night,” he writes in his diary the next day; “got up and worked from 1 to 4 at Sundering Flood.” On the 31st of January he attended a meeting, at the Society of Arts, of the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, and made a brief speech in support of the first resolution moved. He never spoke in public again after this. On the day before, he had been for the last time at the weekly meeting of the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings. As he walked up Buckingham Street after the meeting, a friend ventured to observe, noting his obvious weakness, that it was the worst time of the year. “No, it ain’t,” he returned, “it’s a very fine time of the year indeed: I’m getting old, that’s what it is.”
On the 27th of November he had written from Rottingdean, where he had gone for a few days by himself, to Lady Burne-Jones:
“To-day has been quite mild, and I started out at ten and went to a mountain with some barns on the top, and a chalk pit near (where you took me one hot evening in September, you remember), and I walked on thence a good way, and should have gone further, but prudence rather than weariness turned me back. They were ploughing a field in the bottom with no less than ten teams of great big horses: they were knocking off for their bever just as I came on them, and seemed very jolly, and my heart went out to them, both men and horses.
“I brought my University book” — this was Mr. Rashdall’s “Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages,” a work for which he expressed the highest respect and admiration— “down with me, but deserted it yesterday afternoon for Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ which I have just finished. I am getting better here, but was better on Sunday for the matter of that. The doctor called on Monday, and told me it was good for me not to be victimized by bores, and that I had better not be: this seems to me such very good advice, that I pass it on to you; but am just struck with fear that you may begin the practice of it on me. Anyhow I will be cautious enough of it not to make this letter longer.”
In December the Chaucer was making such good progress that he began to design a binding for it. Even here he was confronted by the difficulty of obtaining sound material. “Leather is not good now,” he said in talking about this matter; “what used to take nine months to cure is done in three. They used to say, what ‘s longest in the tanyard stays least time in the market: but that no longer holds good. People don’t know how to buy now; they’ll take anything.” The truth in this last sentence goes very deep. The manufacture — so Morris perpetually urged — is but the servant of the public, and the buyer is equally responsible with the seller (each, he would add, doing their best to cheat the other) for a state of things which floods all markets with cheap dishonest work.
As the Chaucer approached completion, Morris became nervous about anything which threatened, however remotely, to delay it. “I’d like it finished to-morrow,” he answered, when asked how early a date would satisfy him for its appearance: “every day beyond to-morrow that it isn’t done is one too many.” In his own library one day before Christmas, a visitor looking over the sheets that were lying on the table remarked on the added beauty of those sheets following the Canterbury Tales where picture-pages face one another in pairs. Morris took alarm. “Now don’t you go saying that to Burne-Jones,” he said, “or he’ll be wanting to do the first part over again; and the worst of that would be, that he’d want to do all the rest over again, because the other would be so much better, and then we should never get done, but always be going round and round in a circle.” The last of the eighty-seven pictures was finished two days after Christmas. In the same week Morris had begun to write the story of “The Sundering Flood,” the last of his prose romances. During that December he had enriched his collection of manuscripts by two splendid examples of the thirteenth century, for which he paid upwards of a thousand pounds; one a folio Bible, in three volumes, of French work of the end of the century, and the other a Psalter of slightly earlier date, variously ascribed to Rouen or Beauvais, and richly adorned with miniatures in the finest manner of that fine period.
With the turn of the year the weakness that had been gaining on him for some months became much more pronounced. He now suffered from an exhausting cough; he was losing flesh noticeably, and sleeplessness became a regular feature of his nights. He wrote a little of “The Sundering Flood” every day, and did work nearly every day for initials and borders for the Kelmscott Press editions of “The Well at the World’s End” and “The Earthly Paradise.” But his working hours became shorter and shorter. In February another visit to Rottingdean was tried, but he was languid and made no improvement. On his return he was induced to consult Sir William Broadbent. The existence of diabetes and other complications was confirmed, but not to a degree which implied immediate danger. There were fluctuations and slight improvements followed by relapses, but on the whole he was now steadily losing ground, and as his weakness increased, losing heart. “I don’t feel any better: so weak,” is a pathetic note in his diary of work at the end of February: and a journey round his garden at Hammersmith was now sufficient to tire him. The daily progress of the Chaucer was the one thing that kept up his interest. It was now within sight of completion. The last three of the wood-blocks had been brought him on the 21st of March. The Easter holidays in April, “four mouldy Sundays in a mouldy row, the press shut and Chaucer at a standstill,” were almost more than he could bear But his eagerness over the acquisition of fresh manuscripts was unabated. In March he had bought from Mr. W. A. S. Benson a fine folio Testament of the twelfth century, which he discovered, to his great delight, had belonged to the same religious house near Dijon as a Josephus which he had acquired a few months before. Towards the end of April he was roused to great excitement by news of a splendid twelfth-century English Bestiary, containing one hundred and six miniatures, which was offered for sale by Mr. Rosenthal of Munich. He at once began to negotiate for it: as Mr. Rosenthal would not take the risk of sending it on approval, Mr. Cockerell went to Stuttgart, where the book was, with full powers. It turned out to be even finer than had been expected; even the British Museum possessed nothing in Bestiaries equal to it. A contemporary note in the book itself recorded that it had been given in the year 1187 to Worksop Priory, together with other books, by one Philip, Canon of Lincoln. Both writing and miniatures, with which it is profusely illustrated, were of the best and most characteristic English style of the period. Mr. Cockerell bought it for £900, and brought it back with him to Kelmscott, where Morris had gone for what turned out to be his last visit. He was delighted with it beyond measure.
From Kelmscott he wrote, during this visit, to Lady Burne-Jones;
“I cannot say that I think I am better since I saw you a week ago; and I hope I am no worse; only you see down in this deep quiet, away from the excitements of business, and callers, and doctors, one is rather apt to brood, and I fear that I have made myself very disagreeable at times.
“However, I am going on with my work, both drawing and writing, though but little of the latter, as Walker was with me Saturday and Sunday, to my great comfort. Ellis comes on Saturday, and will stay till I go back. Here everything is as beautiful as it can be: up to now the season is a fine one, the grass well grown and well coloured; the apple-blossom plentifuller than we have ever had it here. The weather with lots of sun, though I should have preferred that alternated with a few warm showers instead of the veil of cold cloud which has no promise of rain in it (like Hud’s dry cloud that hung over the city of Sheddad, the son of Ad the Greater) and withering wind with it.
“However I have enjoyed the garden very much, and should never be bored by walking about and about in it. And though you think I don’t like music, I assure you that the rooks and the blackbirds have been a great consolation to me. We are still between the flowers, for nothing stirs this beastly weather. The thing that was the pleasingest surprise was the raspberry-canes, which Giles has trellised up neatly, so that they look like a mediæval garden: they are thriving splendidly.
“Moreover Hobbs has been re-thatching a lot of his sheds and barns, which sorely needed it, and used to keep me in a fever of terror of galvanized iron: so that this time at least there is some improvement in the villages.”
At Kelmscott he had written the last of his contributions to the literature of Socialism, a brief article for the May-Day number of “Justice.” When he returned to London on the 6th of May he found that all the picture sheets of the Chaucer had been printed off, and the block of the title-page was ready for approval. The printing was completed two days later. At the end of May he went for a few days to Mr. Wilfrid Blunt at Newbuildings Place; he was then too weak to work, but could enjoy the beautiful West Sussex country. He returned to London on the 30th: and on the 2nd of June the first two copies of the Chaucer came from the binder, one for himself and the other for Burne-Jones. Morris’ own copy is now in the library of Exeter College. The other was given on the 3rd of June by Sir Edward Burne-Jones to his daughter for her birthday. “I want particularly to draw your attention,” Burne-Jones wrote of the volume when complete, and the feeling is one which Morris himself fully and cordially shared, “to the fact that there is no preface to Chaucer, and no introduction, and no essay on his position as a poet, and no notes, and no glossary; so that all is prepared for you to enjoy him thoroughly.”
Thus the work which had been for just five years in project, and for three years and four months in actual preparation and execution, was brought to a conclusion. The printing had occupied a year and nine months. Besides Burne-Jones’s eighty-seven pictures, it contains a full-page woodcut title, fourteen large borders, eighteen borders or frames for the pictures, and twenty-six large initial words. All of these, besides the ornamented initial letters large and small, were designed by Morris himself, as was the white pigskin binding with silver clasps, executed at Mr. Cobden-Sanderson’s bindery by Mr. Douglas Cockerell, in which the Kelmscott Chaucer receives its complete form.
CHAPTER XXII. ILICET
IT was his last finished work. His weakness was already so great that the ambiguous reports of professional advisers could no longer conceal the fact that the end was not far off. He still, on days when the depression of his illness was less severe, cherished the hope of going on with the great Froissart, which was to be a sister volume to the Chaucer, and with the sumptuous folio edition of his own “Sigurd the Volsung.” The series of woodcuts for the “Sigurd “ from drawings by Sir Edward Burne-Jones had been already planned, and a number of designs for them made. In May Burne-Jones, though with but little hope that the work could ever be carried out, had offered to increase the number of these pictures to forty. The proposal had been joyfully accepted by Morris, and roused him for a little into fresh life. His daily work was now mainly designing borders for the “Sigurd,” and he still was able to do a little at it every day. Before either of these large works, however, another small book was to have been printed, which would have been one of the most beautiful products of the Kelmscott Press. This was the tale of “The Hill of Venus,” to be written in prose by himself and adorned by the twelve exquisite designs made by Burne-Jones for the story nearly thirty years before.
At the beginning of July he completed his collection of painted books by a Psalter which for style, colour, and execution was the finest of them all. He gave it the name of the Windmill Psalter from a windmill which was prominent in the design upon the page next following the “Beatus.” This book, a folio of about the year 1270, had been acquired, with several leaves missing, about five and twenty years previously, by Mr. Henry Hucks-Gibbs, now Lord Aldenham. Four of the missing leaves were, however, extant, and had been sold many years before by Ellis to Mr. Fairfax Murray, who after much solicitation had consented to exchange them with Morris for five sheets of drawings on vellum by an Italian master of the fifteenth century. Lord Aldenham’s book was exhibited among the English manuscripts collected and shown in the summer of 1896 by the Society of Antiquaries in their rooms at Burlington House. To that exhibition Morris also lent the four leaves in question, together with six of the best of his own English painted books. They were placed next the book to which they had originally belonged. When Morris went with Burne-Jones on the 5th of June to see the collection, the relationship of the two portions of the book was obvious. “We looked,” Morris writes exultantly the next day to Ellis, “and lo! there was no doubt — there was the book with the due hiatuses. And now, whatten a book was that, my man? Why, as soon as I saw its second leaf, I recognized it as the book which I saw in your shop in Bond Street, and which I have talked so much to you about, and which you told me you sold, or some one else sold, to Hucks-Gibbs. Are you thunderstruck? But now the question is, How am I to get hold of the Hucks-Gibbs ‘fragment’? Perhaps you can suggest some course of procedure. Come up and talk about it.”
Finally, after much debate, Morris wrote to Lord Aldenham explaining the case, and offering him £1,000 for the Psalter. He was out of town; and the three days that passed before his answer came were spent by Morris in much agitation. At last the answer came. “Letter in morning,” Morris notes in his diary, “from Lord A., kind and friendly, will let me have the book. Sent Cockerell after it with cheque in afternoon, and it came back at 4: a great wonder.”
