Complete works of willia.., p.833
Complete Works of William Morris, page 833
There were two other books in the exhibition at Burlington House which he coveted as much or even more. One was the famous Apocalypse from the Archbishop’s Library at Lambeth, “a book with the most amazing design and beauty in it.” This was, of course, unattainable. But the other was in private ownership; it was a Psalter, even finer than Lord Aldenham’s, belonging to the Duke of Rutland: “such a book! my eyes! and I am beating my brains to see if I can find any thread of an intrigue to begin upon, so as to creep and crawl toward the possession of it.” He entered on negotiations, and offered a much higher sum than he had paid for the Windmill Psalter, but in vain; and this last pleasure was denied him.
For the greater part of June he had been, by medical advice, staying at Folkestone to try the effects of change of air, but without any beneficial result. His nervous prostration had by this time become very great. The news which he learned on the way down to Folkestone of the death of his old friend, John Henry Middleton, completely broke him down. “I did like him very much,” he wrote mournfully to Lady Burne-Jones a few days afterwards: “we had a deal to talk about, and much in common as to our views of things and the world, and his friendliness to his friends was beyond measure.” But he enjoyed strolling about the harbour and walking on the Leas, and on one very fine bright day he managed to go to Boulogne and back with Mr. Cockerell. Relays of friends came down to keep him company: Sir Edward and Lady Burne-Jones, Mr. Ellis, Mr. Cockerell, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, Mr. E. Walker, Mr. Catterson-Smith. On the 24th of June the first fully bound copy of his Chaucer was brought down to him by Mr. Douglas Cockerell, and was approved by him as in every way satisfactory. On his return to London early in July, he went to report himself to Sir William Broadbent. “He thought me a little better (I’m not), and ordered me a sea voyage.”
The voyage fixed on was one to Norway, on an Orient liner which was making a special trip as far as Spitzbergen for the solar eclipse of that year. It was hoped that the keen northern sea air might prove beneficial, and that the historic associations of Norway might serve to alleviate the monotony of the voyage. Much to his satisfaction, his old friend, Mr. John Carruthers, the companion of other journeys in previous years, found himself at the last moment able to go with him. They started on the 22nd of July. The last entry in his diary had been made on the 20th.
But the voyage, whether wisely counselled or not, was not happy either in its progress or in its results. His beloved books and manuscripts had to be left behind: he suffered from almost constant weariness and restlessness: he was not able to make any excursions inland, and the melancholy of the firths struck a chill on his spirits in spite of fine weather and warm suns. Off Bergen a last gleam of the Viking spirit came over him as he gazed on “the old hills which the eyes of the old men looked on when they did their best against the Weirds.” But his own fighting days were over.
He stayed at Vadsö near the North Cape for the week in which the steamer went on to Spitzbergen and returned. On the morning of the 18th of August he arrived again at Tilbury, with only one anxious wish, to get away to Kelmscott as soon as possible. But his illness took a serious turn a day or two afterwards, and the doctors had to forbid his removal. He never left Hammersmith again. He was so weak now that he had to dictate the few letters he wrote, though on some days he did a little designing of letters and ornaments for the Press. To his old friend, Mr. Thomas Wardle of Leek, who had written pressing him to try the effect of rest and the pure Derbyshire air at Swainslow, he wrote as follows, the body of the letter being dictated and the signature added feebly in his own hand:
“Kelmscott House,
“August 26th, 1896.
“My dear Wardle,
“It is very kind of you to invite me to share in your paradise, and I am absolutely delighted to find another beautiful place which is still in its untouched loveliness. I should certainly have accepted your invitation, but I am quite unable to do so, for at present I cannot walk over the threshold, being so intensely weak. The Manifold is the same river, is it not, which you carried me across on your back, which situation tickled us so much that, owing to inextinguishable laughter, you very nearly dropped me in. What pleasant old times those were.
“With all good wishes and renewed thanks,
“I am yours very truly,
“WILLIAM MORRIS.”
On the 8th of September, with some difficulty, he dictated the last dozen lines of “The Sundering Flood” to Mr. Cockerell, and seemed to find relief in having been able to bring it to a conclusion. The last letter he had been able to write himself was one of a few lines to Lady Burne-Jones, who was at Rottingdean, on the 1st of September. “Come soon,” it ends, “I want a sight of your dear face.”
During his absence two more books had been issued from the Kelmscott Press. One of them, “Laudes Beatæ Mariæ Virginis,” consisted of a series of Latin poems to the Virgin, from an English Psalter of the early thirteenth century which was one of the manuscripts in his own possession, and one of extreme beauty as regards both writing and ornament. For the first time he had, in this beautiful little volume, tried the experiment of printing in three colours. The result was entirely successful, and the effect of the red was much enhanced by the fine blue which he used as the third colour. The other book was the first volume of a sumptuous eight-volume edition of “The Earthly Paradise.” A second volume was issued in September. The remaining six, all of which include borders and half borders specially designed by him and not used in any other book, were completed and issued after his death. In these posthumous volumes, however, there are three borders which had been designed in Morris’ manner by Mr. Catterson-Smith; these being the only instances of any letter, border, or ornament (with the exception of a little Greek type which occurs in two books) printed at the Kelmscott Press and not actually designed by Morris himself and drawn with his own hand.
Among the protects that had dated from the earliest days of the Press were two which various circumstances had from time to time put off, and which were now once more much in his mind. One of these was the printing of a selection of mediæval English lyrical poetry. He had discussed the plan of such a book with Mr. Wyatt when they were working together at “Beowulf,” and just before he started on the voyage to Norway Mr. Wyatt had sent him a list of early English poems for consideration. But he was too weak then to do anything with it. The other proposed volume was one which lay even nearer his heart; it was a volume of the Border Ballads, which had been his delight since boyhood, and which he often maintained to be the highest achievement in poetry which the language had to show. This also had been planned years before; and early in 1894 he had been discussing the thorny question of a text with Ellis. He had persuaded himself that it was possible to form such a text by selection from the different versions. “You see,” he said, “no one version has more authority than another; it is a matter of literary merit;” — and no doubt were the formation of such a text at all possible, it would have had its best chances of success in his hands. During this autumn, when he was too ill to do anything else, he amused himself by having the ballads read aloud to him and beginning to form his own version. Mr. Ellis, who was daily with him, and who did most of this work for him, was well aware that the selection could never be completed, and no longer argued the question with him.
Among the larger unexecuted protects which had at one time or another been formed for the Kelmscott Press, the Shakespeare in three folio volumes, which had been announced in 1893, had been definitely abandoned, and the reprint of the English Bible of 1611, though not formally given up, had receded into a problematical future. The “Sigurd” and the Froissart would have been the work of at least two years; and after them the next work planned was to have been a volume of even greater magnificence than the Chaucer, a folio edition of Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur,” for which Sir Edward Burne-Jones was to design at least a hundred pictures. With the added experience and increased technical skill now available, it should have eclipsed even the Chaucer in splendour of design and beauty of execution. Of other items in the mass of work which lay before the Press, an account is given in the last book issued from it before it was finally wound up in March, 1898. In that little volume Mr. Cockerell has added to Morris’ own account of his aims in founding and conducting the Press, a description of its inception and progress, and an annotated list of the books printed at it, with a fullness, lucidity, and accuracy which leave nothing to be desired.
Morris himself was now known by his friends to be a dying man. On his return from Norway congestion of the left lung had set in, which remained persistent, and the general organic degeneration made steady progress. His old fear of death had long left him, but his desire to live remained almost as strong as ever till he became too weak to desire anything. As the power of self-control slackened, the emotional tenderness which had always been so large an element in his nature became more habitually visible. On one of her latest visits, Lady Burne-Jones tells me, he broke into tears when something was said about the hard life of the poor. He had a longing to hear for the last time some of that older music for which he had so great an admiration. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch brought down a pair of virginals to Kelmscott House, and played to him several pieces by English composers of the sixteenth century. A pavan and galliard by William Byrd were what Morris liked most. He broke into a cry of joy at the opening phrase, and after the two pieces had been repeated at his request, was so deeply stirred that he could not bear to hear any more.
The weariness of that September was also alleviated by the thoughtful kindness of Mr. R. H. Benson, who took to him, one after another, several of the priceless thirteenth-century manuscripts from the Dorchester House library: among them a Psalter written at Amiens, and a book even more fascinating to him, a “Bible Historiée et Vies des Saints” containing, besides initial and marginal ornament of unsurpassed wealth and beauty of invention, no less than one thousand and thirty-four pictures, beginning with the Creation and concluding with the coming of Antichrist and the end of the world, toutes ymaginées et etitulées et escripture exposées. This last book he had by him for a week, and though he was too weak to look at it for more than a few minutes together, he always went back to it with fresh delight.
During the last weeks he was attended, beyond his own family, by the untiring devotion of his friends. Miss Mary De Morgan brought to this last service all the skill born of long experience, and the intelligent sympathy of an affection which Morris had for many years cordially returned. Sir Edward and Lady Burne-Jones, Mr. Webb, and Mr. Ellis were with him almost daily. Mr. Cockerell was ceaseless in his zeal and care; and Mr. Emery Walker nursed him with the patience and tenderness of a woman. On the morning of Saturday the 3rd of October, between eleven and twelve o’clock, he died quietly and without visible suffering.
No man on earth dies before his day: and least of all can the departure be called premature of a man whose life had been so crowded in activity and so rich in achievement. To one judging by the work done in it, his working day was longer and ampler than often falls to the lot of our brief and pitiable human race. But the specific reasons why that life was not protracted beyond its sixty-third year are not difficult to assign. On the paternal side of his family there was a marked neurotic and gouty tendency. Himself of powerful physique, deep-chested, sound-lunged, big-hearted, he yet carried in him that family weakness, which was developed under the pressure of an immensely busy life. On a constitution made sensitive by gout, the exposure of the years of the Socialist crusade, when he had perpetually spoken in the open air in all weathers, and in the worse than open air of indoor meetings, and had often neglected or forgone proper food and rest, told with fatal effect. “I have no hesitation,” his family doctor writes to me, “in saying that he died a victim to his enthusiasm for spreading the principles of Socialism.” Yet this was only the special form that, in those years, his unceasing and prodigious activity had taken: and these words may be enlarged or supplemented by those of an eminent member of the same profession: “I consider the case is this: the disease is simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men.”
“Remembering those early years,” says Sir Edward Burne-Jones, “and comparing them with the last in which I knew him, the life is one continuous course. His earliest enthusiasms were his latest. The thirteenth century was his ideal period then, and it was still the same in our last talks together; nor would he ever wander from his allegiance. The changes that have come over later impressions about art passed beside him or under him with scarcely any notice.”
With all the patience and conciliatoriness of his later years, he remained absolutely unshaken in his loyalty to his old opinions and to his old associates. “He was most tolerable with the opinions of others,” are the quaint but touching words of one of his colleagues of the Socialist League. But his own opinions were never withdrawn or concealed; and to the last he could be roused to anger by any slighting words about things for which his own admiration was a fixed article of faith. Among the younger men who came about him in these years were some who, full of the latest ideas and methods in painting, were ready to disparage the work of Burne-Jones. One of them ventured, one day at Kelmscott House, to give some expression of this disparagement, fancying perhaps that Morris might not find it wholly ungrateful. Morris, as his wont was when things were not going to his mind, began to walk about the room and fidget with the things lying on his study table. His visitor continued, undeterred by these warnings. Then Morris broke out. “Look here, —— ,” he said, “you mustn’t say that sort of thing in mixed company, you know, or you’ll run a great chance of being taken for a fool.”
For Burne-Jones his own admiration was undulled by their complete and lifelong fraternity, and untouched by any later divergence in social habit or doctrine. Even in matters of art they did not see alike. Just as the restless energy of the one was in strong contrast to the other’s patient scholarship and continuous absorption, so they received or re-incarnated the Middle Ages through the eyes and brain in the one case of a Norman, in the other of a Florentine. But these very differences only made them the more fully complementary to one another. Morris’ deep feeling for Burne-Jones’s work is expressed, though in studiously restrained language, in the Birmingham address of 1891 on the Pre-Raphaelite School. But it may be even better judged from a more casual utterance. Once at the Grange he was — perhaps for the hundredth time — pressing for more and yet more designs for woodcuts for the Kelmscott Press. “You would think,” Sir Edward said, turning to me with his wonderful smile, “to listen to Top, that I was the only artist in the world.” “Well,” said Morris quietly, “perhaps you wouldn’t be so far wrong.”
With well-meaning persons who came to him for advice or information he had grown wonderfully tolerant. In reply to an earnest correspondent who had asked his views on the subject of temperance, he replied in a letter which deserves record for its exquisite interplay of demure humour and solid sense.
“Dear Sir,” he wrote, “I think the question of the advantage of alcoholic liquors is a matter which each man must find out for himself, having admitted that one may easily drink too much even without getting drunk. My own experience is that I find my victuals dull without something to drink, and that tea and coffee are not fit liquors to be taken with food: in fact the latter always disagrees with me palpably, and probably tea isn’t good for me. It is a remarkable fact that in Iceland toothache was almost unknown till the introduction of tea and coffee: the latter drink the Icelanders are now much addicted to.
“If I were to say what I really think I should say that tobacco seems to me a more dangerous intoxicant than liquors, because people can and do smoke to excess without becoming beastly and a nuisance. I am sure that Oriental countries have suffered much from the in-production of tobacco. N.B. — I am a smoker myself. A great point would be to try to get the liquors free from adulteration. But that I fear is impossible under a capitalistic régime.”
His patience even extended to others less worthy of it: to those who came to him with the more or less concealed intention of getting something to their own advantage out of him, or in order to instruct him on matters in which he had taught their teachers. When his activity in the Socialist movement brought round him a mass of more or less disreputable professing adherents, whose application of the principles of Socialism did not go much beyond the idea that Morris should share his money with them, he carried his indulgence to an extreme pitch. He told a friend of his once that a young man and woman, quite unknown, had called on him and asked him to give them a start, as they were going to be married. “Were they Socialists?” his friend asked. “I don’t know,” Morris answered; “I suppose so. I gave them five pounds to get rid of them, as I was busy.”
The life of insults through which he had passed both before and after he became a Socialist had at last left him almost secure of his own temper. His friend, Mr. Newman Howard, has told me that once when they had been doing business together, he took Morris to his own club, which was a Conservative one. An acquaintance of Mr. Howard’s, who did not know Morris, sat down at the same table with them, and opened conversation with Morris by asking, “Well, what do you think of these strikes? I can tell you: it isn’t so much the workmen: it’s those damned Socialist leaders. They are infernal thieves and rascals, the whole lot of them.” Bland and impenetrable, Morris only answered “Indeed,” in such a quiet flat voice as made it impossible to continue the subject.
One result of that growing patience was to make him more indifferent to criticism. As much from a certain “childlike shamelessness” which has been noted by one of his most intimate friends as his deepest quality, as from his no less unique self-absorption in his own thoughts and feelings, external criticism had never much effected him. No doubt there must have been a certain loss in this carelessness to the effect which his work, and he himself, made on others. Criticism has its value in letting an artist, or a human being, see, more clearly than he could do of his own self, to what he and his work really amount for his fellow-artists and fellow-creatures: and the absence of sensitiveness in an artist to the effect produced by his work may imply even for the work itself a certain loss of sensitiveness and flexibility. With Morris one often felt that it would make little or no difference to him if no one else ever saw his designs or read his books. Certainly it made no difference to him whether they met with approval from the world, or even from other artists in other methods. He might have taken for his own an ancient Celtic saying: “God has made out of his abundance a separate wisdom for everything that lives, and to do these things is my wisdom.”
