John Morris

“ Had he not written at all he would still have been a remarkable and memorable man, but having written much, and as poet, his claim as such must be considered before all others. And Morris's poetry is a permanent record of the man's temper, of his spiritual adventures and discoveries, not a desultory series of impressions imposed by external events, but the continuous manifestation of his reading of life. His conception of art, formed in his youth, as the expression of joy in living, as the immediate and necessary outcome of life itself wherever life was full, knew no change to the end. ”

“ It is no honour to the giants of the earth to pit them one against another for our sport. That Morris was or was not the greatest poet of his age or century is a matter of complete unimportance upon which nothing depends. The supremely important thing, the splendid circumstance, is that here again in due season was a man unmistakably moulded in heroic proportions, one claiming and proving kinship with the masters whose names are but few. If humanity was fortunate enough to see others of his peers in his own day we can but be thankful for grace so prodigal ”

“ In it Morris gives once again a picture of that life lived in close contact with earth which he so earnestly desired, but it is not the complete life of The Earthly Paradise or News from Nowhere. The people are not yet free, although they have not yet fallen to the indifference to freedom that Morris looked upon as the most distressing manifestation of his own day. Together with this picture we have a long discussion between John Ball, the people's priest, and the dreamer—Morris himself—as to the result of the risings that are then taking shape, and the future of civilization. ”

“ Morris was not only great as a man of genius and of general attainments; he was great in the high manliness and in the amplitude and richness of his nature. The impression of strength, of self-sufficiency, of action, of great individuality in him was felt by everyone in his presence. ”

“ William Morris was an avowed socialist long before so many men began to grow fond of calling themselves Christian Socialists. Morris was too practical not to know that the time is not ripe for life on a communal basis, but in his heart was a high and holy ideal that he has partially explained in his books, "A Dream of John Ball" and "News From Nowhere," and more fully in many lectures. His sympathy was ever with the workingman and those who grind fordone at the wheel of labor. To better the condition of the toiler was his sincere desire. ”

“ No poet has ever had a more infallible instinct as to what was and what was not of the stuff of poetry.
With Jason and The Earthly Paradise, Morris establishes his claim to greatness. The height of his power is not yet reached, but here already we have a breadth of design, an intensity of perception, and a sureness of utterance about which there can be no question. Not only does he prove himself to be a narrative poet of the first rank, but in the songs and interludes he attains a sweetness and tenderness which if not matchless are certainly not surpassed. ”

“ But having said that Morris was not an orator, and without judging this to be either a merit or a defect in him, I must hasten to say that his public speaking, to those who had ears to hear, was one of the finest things to listen to that could be heard on an English platform. It was so like what one expected of him, so characteristic of the man, so interesting in substance and manner, and withal so fresh, so natural and uneffortful, and full of personal flavour. It was as different from the customary platform oratory as a mountain spring is from a garden fountain. ”

“ And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only . . . by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman." [44]
Morris' contributions to the literature of Socialism include, besides his romance, "News from Nowhere," two volumes of verse, "Poems by the Way" (1891) and "The Dream of John Ball" ”

“ Æschylus, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Beethoven, Wagner, Shelley, Wordsworth—there is an inspiration to the lips in the very names of these men and their fellows, but there must be no disputation as to the headship in their presence; they themselves will but laugh if they heed us at all. And Morris is, as I see him, clearly of that fellowship. By some strange generosity of nature he was not only allowed to give great poetry to the world, but also to readjust for us the significance of life in phases a little lower than the highest. ”

“ Morris was a singular instance of a man of immense industry and force of character, whose whole life, through a long period of manifold activity and multiform production, was guided by a very few simple ideas. His rapid movements from one form of productive energy to another often gave occasion for perplexity to his friends as well as for satire from his opponents. But in fact all these varying energies were directed towards a single object, the re-integration of human life ; and he practised so many arts because to him art was a single thing. ”

“ The fame of Morris during his life was probably somewhat obscured by the variety of his accomplishments. In all his work after he reached mature life there is a marked absence of extravagance, of display, of superficial cleverness or effectiveness, and an equally marked sense of composition and subordination. Thus his poetry is singularly devoid of striking lines or phrases, and his wall-papers and chintzes only reveal their full excellence by the lastingness of the satisfaction they give. His genius as a pattern-designer is allowed by all qualified judges to have been unequalled. ”

“ We have seen that the earth was to Morris from boyhood in some sort a sacred thing. And the people of the earth were no less. His one overmastering passion was for a world wherein men and women lived in full responsiveness to the beauty of the earth, labouring with their hands and adventurous and capricious in spirit, finding joy in their work and in contact with each other, and rejecting all the things of civilization that were dulling and mechanical. ”

“ It was an ideal home for a boy with healthy outdoor tastes. There Morris, rambling with his brothers on foot or on Shetland ponies through the Forest, formed his intense love of nature and his keen eye for all sorts of woodland life. He never ceased to love Epping Forest, and to uphold the scenery of his native county as beautifully and characteristically English. The dense hornbeam thickets, which even in bright weather have something of solemnity and mystery in their deep shade, and which are hardly found elsewhere in England, reappear again and again in his poetry and his prose romances. ”

“ Thus it was that, before and after the adoption of his final political creed, Morris carried on his work patiently from day to day, and thus it was that he exhorted others by word and example to carry on theirs; "not living like fools and fine gentlemen, and not beaten by the muddle, but like good fellows trying by some dim candle-light to set our workshop ready against to-morrow's daylight." ”

“ No more perfect example of critical stupidity could well be found than the notion that Morris, as a creative artist, separated himself from the affairs of the life about him, as if in retreat. Every line of poetry that he wrote was the direct expression of the spirit in which he ordered his daily practice. ”

“ But as to the knock on thy cheekbone, I will boot thee therefor, if thou wilt take boot and abide, for though thou be no hard worker, nor very deft of thy hands, yet the winter is lonely here, and thou wilt be missed somewhat."
Quoth John: "Yea, goodman, but there is this in it withal, that Wethermel liketh me not, though I say nought against thee for a master. I love not thy were-wolves, that are big and gruesome enough to frighten two stout armed men; and I love not thy Dwarfs, who cut off their own heads and stick them on again, and give guesting to little lads, doing them no hurt ”

“ A college literary club, including among its members John Richard Green (who entered as a scholar in 1855) , jointly produced a poem entitled 'The Gentiad', satirising the more exclusive and wealthier set to which Morris belonged (Letters of J. R. Green, p. 15) . One of its most caustic lines, attributed by Morris to Green, though it is authoritatively stated it was not written by him, gave great offence to Morris owing to a subtle imputation on his father's professional conduct. ”

“ Morris had the disability, if it be such, of being incapable of assuming any character or views other than his own. He could never have been an actor; he had no histrionic talent. In his speech, his writings, his art, in all things that he did, he was always William Morris. There never perhaps was an artist or writer whose work was invariably so unmistakably his own. From but a sentence or two of any writing of his, or the smallest scrap of one of his designs, his authorship can be discovered at once. ”

“ Some lessons in rudimentary technique might have been learned by these men from their predecessors, but their powers of expression were vibrant as some newly-discovered energy, and they used them in all their freshness to embody a sane, simple view of life such as Morris himself held. The subtlety which might follow in the evolution from these beginnings, the greater intricacy of achievement, would take their place in his consciousness, but nothing could ever displace his worship of these frank and exultant records of man's joy in his work, a joy that he hoped would yet be regained. ”

“ In his spare time, besides the poems and stories which he went on pouring forth, Morris was beginning to practise more than one handicraft—clay-modelling, carving in wood and stone, and illuminating. A page of his illumination is extant, done in this year. It shows great certainty and mastery in colour, but not the complete grasp of the art which he had acquired a year later; the drawing is uncertain, and the writing not good. His eye for colour was always perfect, and his knowledge with regard to it amazing. ”

“ Among associates and followers of later years were the few survivors of that remarkable fellowship which had founded the Oxford Brotherhood and the Firm of Red Lion Square; and at the head of the grave Sir Edward Burne-Jones, the closest and the first friend of all, stood and saw a great part of his own life lowered into earth. "What I should do, or how I should get on without him," he had once said when Morris's increasing weakness became alarming, "I don't in the least know. I should be like a man who has lost his back." ”

“ But if we really know the iron works itself, we know that it is hideously ugly, using men half as beasts, half as machines, choking the air and wounding the earth, a thing definitely unpoetic because definitely a denial of life. Morris worked in quite another manner. Instead of lending ugliness the undeserved beauty and colour of his own temperament, he stripped all things that came into his vision of all that was inessential, all the excrescences of accident and will, and then allowed them in their renewed simplicity to find natural and direct expression. ”

“ Morris's rooms were in the little quadrangle affectionately known among Exeter men as Hell Quad, with windows overlooking the small but beautiful Fellows' garden, the immense chestnut tree that overspreads Brasenose Lane, and the grey masses of the Bodleian Library. There the long nights set in to crown the long days. On the first night of one of their terms in college, after Burne-Jones had arrived late from Birmingham, and had supper, "presently Morris came tumbling in," he wrote home next day, "and talked incessantly for the next seven hours or longer." ”

“ Then again John Ball spoke and said, "In good sooth, I deem ye wot no worse than I do what is to do—and first that somewhat we shall do— since it is for him that is lonely or in prison to dream of fellowship, but for him that is of a fellowship to do and not to dream. ”

“ So long as any human industry existed which had once been exercised as an art in the full sense, and had now become mechanical or commercial, so long Morris would instinctively have passed from one to another, tracing back each to its source, and attempting to reconstitute each as a real art so far as the conditions of the modern world permitted. When he became a socialist, it was because he had realised that these existing conditions were stronger than any individual genius or any private co-operation, and that towards a new birth of art a new kind of life was necessary. ”

“ On the Monday morning, Morris took the first train down to Oxford to be at Street's again when the office opened. During these months Rossetti's influence over him grew stronger and stronger. His doctrine that everybody should be a painter, enforced with all the weight of his immense personality and an eloquence and plausibility in talk which all who knew him in those years describe as unparalleled in their experience, carried Morris for a time off his feet. Much, no doubt, of the daily work in an architect's office was in itself uninteresting, or even distasteful to him ”