Morris

“ 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. ”

“ Father Morris goes into the house, and we watch him at every turn, as, with the most liberal simplicity, he makes himself at home, takes off his wig, wipes down his great face with a checked pocket handkerchief, helps himself hither and thither to whatever he wants, and asks for such things as he cannot lay his hands on, with all the comfortable easiness of childhood. ”

“ You will not find in his work a trace of that tired pomposity which tells us that the great man is showing off, or of that empty pretentious singularity which betrays the vanity of the lonely British artist. Morris was never the self-conscious master calling on sun and moon to stand and watch him sign his name, neither was he the shy genius of the English hedgerows sheltering his little talent from contemporary infection and the chill winds of criticism. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ When I mentioned to Lord G. what Morris came about, he only laughed, and said, "It was a clever dodge of the half-pay,—he wanted an invitation;" and I see now that such must have been his object. The more one sees of mankind, the greater appears their meanness; and in my heart I feel how unsuited guileless, simple-hearted creatures like myself are to combat against the stratagems and ambuscades of this wicked world. ”

“ One of Nature’s henchmen, fresh, bold, Viking in the marrow, with a spirit of steel, a man for whom the sea would smile, poet, painter, stainer of glass, weaver of carpets, spinning a world with the strains of his song, socialist and revolutionist, Morris comes as a teasing wind through the dank atmosphere of nineteenth-century commercialism, daring conventions and going his way a body all soul, a majesty supreme to the last. ”

“ But herein, indeed, lay Morris's deepest claim to the name of a great reformer: that he left his work incomplete. There is, perhaps, no better proof that a man is a mere meteor, merely barren and brilliant, than that his work is done perfectly. A man like Morris draws attention to needs he cannot supply. In after-years we may have perhaps a newer and more daring Arts and Crafts Exhibition. In it we shall not decorate the armour of the twelfth century but the machinery of the twentieth. A lamp-post shall be wrought nobly in twisted iron, fit to hold the sanctity of fire. ”

“ In Morris’s world we should all be very happy if we were like Morris. He was not very happy in our world, yet perhaps he managed to get out of it as much of the joy of doing as it can be made to yield to any one man. His Socialism, from one point of view, was certainly a tremendous failure, but no other side of his life visible to the public at large showed so plainly his moral virtues, his generosity, his sincerity, his power of self-sacrifice, his effort toward self-control. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Few men seemed to drink so full a measure of life as William Morris, and, indeed, he frankly admitted in his last days that he had enjoyed his life. I have heard him say that he only knew what it was to be alive. ”

“ Morris made no answer; he was a very dutiful son and humble-spirited. Those who pit their intelligences against the forces of Nature, and try to search out her secrets, become humble. He could not altogether respect his father; the gulf between them was too wide and deep. But even at his present age of three and thirty he considered it a duty to submit himself to him and his vagaries. Outside of other reasons, his mother had prayed him to do so almost with her last breath, and, living or dead, Morris loved his mother. ”

“ Morris was thoroughly a man, and though much of his sinful nature had been subdued, there was enough left to make his heart rise and fall with great throbs of joy as he thought of Katy free, even though that freedom were bought at the expense of dire disgrace to others, and of misery to her. ”

“ Look here, Morris, you think me very silly—almost foolish—don’t you?”
“I never thought anything of the sort. As a matter of fact, if you want to know, I think you a young woman rather more idle than most, and with a perfect passion for burying your talent in very white napkins.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ The societies were all directly concerned with [Pg 193] questions in which Morris had all his life been interested, and his connection with them was not only natural but almost inevitable. He was not a man to whom public business made a strong appeal. He undertook it with reluctance and relinquished it with delight. Nor did he care for the labels of distinction for which most men, even among the greatly distinguished, have a measure of regard. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If, in the months that ensued, neither Morris nor Nina Severing found that a momentary common impulse was to prove an enduring link between them, the knowledge weighed lightly on Morris, to whom no enduring link that humanity can forge would ever equal the glamour of a new enthusiasm. ”

“ Every man who worked under him had to be prepared for occasional outbursts of impatient temper, when Morris spoke, we are told, rather as a good workman scornful of bad work, than as an employer finding fault with his men; but in the long run all were sure to receive fair and friendly treatment.
Such was William Morris at his Merton works, a master craftsman worthy of the best traditions of the Middle Ages, fit to hold his place with the masons of Chartres, the weavers of Bruges, and the wood-carvers of Nuremberg. ”

“ To the very last a new world to conquer roused his spirit and made him tingle to be off. For a man with the trace of the plodder in him such a career would have been an impossible one, but Morris went blithely from craft to craft by a series of leaps and bounds. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ No poet has given more beautiful expression to the sensuous delight of the eye than Morris, and even here, where the mood is one of profound sorrow, the thing seen is described with a sweetness and naturalness that makes it bearable ”

“ Morris was not a young man who needed to be pressed, and he found quite enough encouragement in the superior quality of the claret. The Doctor’s wine was admirable, and it may be communicated to the reader that while he sipped it Morris reflected that a cellar-full of good liquor—there was evidently a cellar-full here—would be a most attractive idiosyncrasy in a father-in-law. The Doctor was struck with his appreciative guest; he saw that he was not a commonplace young man. “He has ability,” said Catherine’s father, “decided ability; he has a very good head if he chooses to use it. ”

“ The book which the King's daughter shows to Hallblithe in his dream on the Acre of the Undying is a sort of figure of that glittering world, rich with all imagined and unimaginable wonders, into which Morris had entered long ago, and the door of which always remained open to him. ”

“ In the mind of Morris it doubtless promised to be the sort of association about which he was constantly dreaming; a group of intelligent craftsmen interested in making the details of daily life as full as possible of beauty, each man fitted to his task and loving it, each in his way a master-workman of the guild, counting his craft honourable and spending his best thought and labour on it. ”

“ If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and come, follow me. Such a course would have accorded with Morris's own early dreams at Oxford of a monastic life, lived by friends in common in the single pursuit of poverty and art. ”

“ Morris was a born teacher, for he was not only full of enthusiasm, but also united to a memory of extraordinary retentiveness a remarkable power of lucid exposition; yet he was so singularly modest that it was often difficult to induce him to address an audience other than his class. His knowledge of geology was encyclopaedic, his critical acumen great, but he disliked the labour of composition. In imparting knowledge verbally he was the most generous of men. ”

“ Morris and the rest of our male selves sat up till midnight in the library, chatting over the events of the day and considering how to improve the propaganda work of the League. When the others had gone, Morris proposed that he should accompany me to my bedroom and read a bit of 'Huckleberry Finn' to me before going to sleep. 'It will get the nasty taste of to-day's squabbling out of our minds,' he said. ”

“ Morris wrote much on religious subjects, but he is best known by his works on natural history, which, although 'popular' rather than scientific, had much literary value. He was never able to accept the theory of evolution, and was an extreme anti-vivisectionist.
His great work was 'A History of British Birds,' in 6 vols. 8vo, London, 1851-7, a third edition of which appeared in 1891. ”

“ Evenings of excited talk and reading slid into the long nights in which Morris poured forth the results in prose and verse of his newly-discovered creative power; and all the while, as the old ideals melted away before larger enthusiasms, the mistress art of architecture, with all else—music, painting, the whole range of forms and colours and sounds—swept up into its train, took a continually deeper and more dominating hold. ”

“ With most men who are on the whole true to the analogy of the chambered nautilus and cast off the outworn shell of their successive phases of individuality as the seasons roll, the effect of early environment and tendency may easily be exaggerated, but Morris grew in the fashion of his beloved oaks, keeping the rings by which his advance in experience was marked ”

“ Morris, if he is a friend of yours.”
“I knew him formerly,” said she, coldly. “I can't say I ever liked him.”
“I remember his name,” said Sir William, in a sort of hesitating way; “there was some story or other about him,—either his wife ran away, or he eloped with somebody's wife.”
“I 'm sure it must have been the former,” said Mrs. Morris, laughing. “Poor gentleman, he does not give one the impression of a Lothario. But whom have we here? The O'Shea, I declare! Look to your heart, May dearest; take my word for it, he never turned out so smartly without dreams of conquest.” ”