1834-96
1834.     Born at Walthamstow, March 24.
1848-51.     Marlborough College.
1853-5.     Exeter College, Oxford.
1856.     Studies architecture under Street.
1857.     Red Lion Square; influence of D. G. Rossetti.
1858.     Defence of Guenevere.
1859.     Marries Miss Jane Burden.
1860-5.     ‘Red House’, Upton, Kent.
1861.     Firm of Art Decorators founded in Queen Square, Bloomsbury. (Dissolved and refounded 1875.)
1867-8.     Life and Death of Jason. 1868-70. Earthly Paradise.
1870.     Tenant of Kelmscott Manor House, on the Upper Thames.
1871-3.     Visits to Iceland; work on Icelandic Sagas.
1876.     Sigurd the Volsung.
1878.     Tenant of Kelmscott House, Hammersmith.
1881.     Works moved to Merton.
1883-4.     Active member of Social Democratic Federation.
1884-90.     Founder and active member of Socialist League.
1891.     Kelmscott Press founded.
1892-6.     Preparation and printing of Kelmscott Chaucer.
1896.     Death at Hammersmith, October 3.
1896.     Burial at Kelmscott, Oxfordshire.
William Morris
Craftsman and Social Reformer

In general it is difficult to account for the birth of an original man at a particular place and time. As Carlyle says: ‘Priceless Shakespeare was the free gift of nature, given altogether silently, received altogether silently.’ Of his childhood history has almost nothing to relate, and what is true of Shakespeare is true in large measure of Burns, of Shelley, of Keats. Even in an age when records are more common, we can only discern a little and can explain less of the silent influences at work that begin to make the man. There are few things more surprising than that, in an age given up chiefly to industrial development, two prosperous middle-class homes should have given birth to John Ruskin and William Morris, so alien in temper to all that traditionally springs from such a soil. In the case of Morris there is nothing known of his ancestry to explain his rich and various gifts. From a child he seemed to have found some spring within himself which drew him instinctively to all that was beautiful in nature, in art, in books. His earliest companions were the Waverley Novels, which he began at the age of four and finished at seven; his earliest haunt was Epping Forest, where he roamed and dreamed through many of the years of his youth.

His father, who was in business in the City of London, as partner in a bill-broking firm, lived at different times at Walthamstow and at Woodford; and the hills of the forest, in some places covered with thick growth of hornbeam or of beech, in others affording a wide view over the levels of the lower Thames, impressed themselves so strongly on the boy’s memory and imagination that this scenery often recurred in the setting of tales which he wrote in middle life.

There was no need of external aid to develop these tastes; and Morris was fortunate in going to a school which did no violence to them by forcing him into other less congenial pursuits. Marlborough College, at the time when he went there in 1848, had only been open a few years. The games were not organized but left to voluntary effort; and during his three or four years at school Morris never took part in cricket or football. In the latter game, at any rate, he should have proved a notable performer on unorthodox lines, impetuous, forcible, and burly as he was. But he found no reason to regret the absence of games, or to feel that time hung heavy on his hands. The country satisfied his wants, the Druidic stones at Avebury, the green water-meadows of the Kennet, the deep glades of Savernake Forest. So strong was the spell of nature, that he hardly felt the need for companionship; and, as chance had not yet thrown him into close relations with any friend of similar tastes, he lived much alone.

It was a different matter at Oxford, to which he proceeded in January 1853. Among those who matriculated at Exeter College that year was a freshman from Birmingham named Edward Burne Jones; and within a few days Morris had begun a friendship with him which lasted for his whole life and was the source of his greatest happiness. For more than forty years their names were associated, and so they will remain for generations to come in Exeter College Chapel, where may be seen the great tapestry of the Nativity designed by one and executed by the other. Burne-Jones had not yet found his vocation as a painter; he came to Oxford like Morris with the wish to take Holy Orders. He was of Welsh family with a Celtic fervour for learning, and a Celtic instinct for what was beautiful, and at King Edward’s School he had made friends with several men who came up to Pembroke College about the same time. Their friendship was extended to his new acquaintance from Marlborough. Here Morris found himself in the midst of a small circle who shared his enthusiasm for literature and art, and among whom he quickly learned to express those ideas which had been stirring his heart in his solitary youth. Through the knowledge gained by close observation and a retentive memory, through his impetuosity and swift decision, Morris soon became a leader among them. Carlyle and Ruskin, Keats and Tennyson, were at this time the most potent influences among them; and when Morris was not arguing and declaiming in the circle at Pembroke, he was sitting alone with Burne-Jones at Exeter reading aloud to him for hours together French romances and other mediaeval tales. Young men of to-day, with a wealth of books on their shelves and of pictures on their walls, with popular reproductions bringing daily to their doors things old and new, can little realize the thrill of excitement with which these men discovered and enjoyed a single new poem of Tennyson or an early drawing by Millais or Rossetti. How they were quickened by ever fresh delight in the beauty and strangeness of such things, how they responded to the magic of romance and dreamed of a day when they should themselves help in the creation of such work, how they started a magazine of their own and essayed short flights in prose or verse, can best be read in the volumes which Lady Burne-Jones50 has dedicated to the memory of her husband. This period is of capital importance in the life of William Morris, and the year 1855 especially was fraught with momentous decisions.

Like Burne-Jones he had gone up to Oxford intending to take Holy Orders in the Church of England; but the last three years had taught him that his interest lay elsewhere. The spirit of faith, of reverence, of love for his fellow men still attracted him to Christianity; but he could not subscribe to a body of doctrine or accept the authority of a single Church. His ideal shifted gradually. At one time he hoped to found a brotherhood which was to combine art with religion and to train craftsmen for the service of the Church; but he was more fitted to work in the world than in the cloister, and the social aspect of this foundation prevailed over the religious. Nor was it mere self-culture to which he aspired. The arts as he understood them were one field, and a wide field, for enlarging the powers of men and increasing their happiness, for continuing all that was most precious in the heritage of the past and passing on the torch to the future; in this field there was work for many labourers and all might be serving the common good.

His own favourite study was the thirteenth century, when princes and merchants, monks and friars, poets and craftsmen had combined to exalt the Church and to beautify Western Europe; and he wished to recreate the nineteenth century in its spirit. And so while Burne-Jones discovered his true gift in the narrower field of painting, Morris began his apprenticeship in the master craft of architecture, and passed from one art to another till he had covered nearly the whole field of endeavour with ever-growing knowledge of principle and restless activity of hand and eye. His father had died in 1847; and when Morris came of age he inherited a fortune of about ￡900 a year and was his own master. Before the end of 1855 he imparted to his mother his decision about taking Orders. The Rubicon was crossed; but on which road he was to reach his goal was not settled for many years. Twice he had to retrace his steps from a false start and begin a fresh career. The year 1856 saw him still working at Oxford, in the office of Street, the architect. Two more years (1857-8) saw him labouring at easel pictures under the influence of Rossetti, though he also published his first volume of poetry at this time. The year 1859 found him married, and for the time absorbed in the making of a home, but still feeling his way towards the choice of a profession.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was in some ways the most original man of his generation; certainly he was the only individual whose influence was ever capable of dominating Morris and drawing him to a course of action which he would not have chosen for himself. Rossetti’s tragic collapse after his wife’s death, and the pictures which he painted in his later life, have obscured the true portrait of this virile and attractive character. Burne-Jones fell completely under his spell, and he tells us how for many years his chief anxiety, over each successive work of art that he finished, was ‘what Gabriel would have thought of it’. So decisive was his judgement, so dominating his personality.

Morris’s period of hesitation ended in 1861, when the first firm of decorators was started among the friends. Of the old Oxford set it included Burne-Jones and Faulkner; new elements were introduced by Philip Webb the architect and Madox Brown the painter. The leadership in ideas might still perhaps belong to Rossetti; but in execution William Morris proved himself at once the captain. The actual work which he contributed in the first year was more than equal to that produced by his six partners, and future years told the same tale.

In the early part of his married life Morris lived in Kent, at Upton, some twelve miles from Charing Cross, in a house built for him by his friend Webb. The house was of red brick, simple but unconventional in character, built to be the home of one who detested stucco and all other shams, and wished things to seem what they were. Its decoration was to be the work of its owner and his friends.

Here we see Morris in the strength of early manhood and in all the exuberance of his rich vigorous nature, surrounded by friends for whom he kept open house, in high contentment with life, eager to respond to all the claims upon his energy. Here came artists and poets, in the pleasant summer days, jesting, dreaming, discussing, indulging in bouts of single-stick or game of bowls in the garden, walking through the country-side, quoting poets old and new, and scheming to cover the walls and cupboards of the rooms with the legends of mediaeval romance. Visitors of the conventional aesthetic type would have many a surprise and many a shock. The jests often took the form of practical jokes, of which Morris, from his explosive temper, was chosen to be the butt, but which in the end he always shared and enjoyed. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Faulkner would conspire to lay booby traps on the doors for him, would insult him with lively caricatures, and with relentless humour would send him to ‘Coventry’ for the duration of a dinner. Or he would have a sudden tempestuous outbreak in which chairs would collapse and door panels be kicked in and violent expletives would resound through the hall. In all, Morris was the central figure, impatient, boisterous, with his thick-set figure, unkempt hair, and untidy clothing, but with the keenest appreciation and sympathy for any manifestation of beauty in literature or in art. But this idyll was short-lived. Ill-health in the Burne-Jones family was followed by an illness which befell Morris himself; and the demand of the growing business and the need for the master to be nearer at hand forced him to leave Upton. The Red House was sold in 1865; and first Bloomsbury and later Hammersmith furnished him with a home more conveniently placed.

The period of his return to London coincided with the most fruitful period of his poetic work. Already at Oxford he had written some pieces of verse which had found favour with his friends. He soon found that his taste and his talent was for narrative poetry; and in 1856 he made acquaintance with his two supreme favourites, Chaucer and Malory. It is to them that he owes most in all that he produced in poetry or in prose, and notably in the Earthly Paradise, which he published between 1868 and 1870. This consists of a collection of stories drawn chiefly from Greek sources, but supposed to be told by a band of wanderers in the fourteenth century. Thus the classic legends are seen through a veil of mediaeval romance. He had no wish to step back, in the spirit of a modern scholar, across the ages of ignorance or mist, and to pick up the classic stones clear-cut and cold as the Greeks left them. To him the legends had a continuous history up to the Renaissance; as they were retold by Romans, Italians, or Proven?als, they were as a plant growing in our gardens, still putting out fresh shoots, not an embalmed corpse such as later scholars have taught us to exhume and to study in the chill atmosphere of our libraries and museums. This mediaevalism of his was much misunderstood, both in literature and in art; people would talk to him as if he were imitating the windows or tapestries of the Middle Ages, whereas what he wanted was to recapture the technical secrets which the true craftsmen had known and then to use these methods in a live spirit to carry on the work to fresh developments in the future.

If the French tales of the fourteenth century were an inspiration to him in his earliest poems, a second influence no less potent was that of the Icelandic Sagas. He began to study them in 1869, and a little later, with the aid of Professor Magnusson, he was translating some of them into English. He made two journeys to Iceland, and was deeply moved by the wild grandeur of the scenes in which these heroic tales were set. For many successive days he rode across grim solitary wastes with more enthusiasm than he could give to the wonted pilgrimages to Florence and Venice. When he was once under the spell, only the geysers with their suggestion of modern text-books and Mangnall’s Questions51 could bore him; all else was magical and entrancing. This enthusiasm bore fruit in Sigurd the Volsung, the most powerful of his epic poems, written in an old English metre, which Morris, with true feeling for craftsmanship, revived and adapted to his theme. His poetry in general, less rich than that of Tennyson, less intense than that of Rossetti, had certain qualities of its own, and owed its popularity chiefly to his gift for telling a story swiftly, naturally and easily, and in such a way as to carry his reader along with him.

His fame was growing in London, which was ready enough in the nineteenth century to make the most of its poets. In Society, if he had allowed it to entertain him, he would have been a picturesque figure, though hardly such as was expected by admirers of his poetry and his art. To some his dress suggested only the prosperous British workman; to one who knew him later he seemed like ‘the purser of a Dutch brig’ in his blue tweed sailor-cut suit. This was his Socialist colleague Mr. Hyndman, who describes ‘his imposing forehead and clear grey eyes with the powerful nose and slightly florid cheeks’, and tells us how, when he was talking, ‘every hair of his head and his rough shaggy beard appeared to enter into the subject as a living part of himself.’ Elsewhere he speaks of Morris’s ‘quick, sharp manner, his impulsive gestures, his hearty laughter and vehement anger’. At times Morris could be bluff beyond measure. Stopford Brooke, who afterwards became one of his friends, recounts his first meeting with Morris in 1867. ‘He didn’t care for parsons, and he glared at me when I said something about good manners. Leaning over the table with his eyes set and his fist clenched he shouted at me, “I am a boor and the son of a boor”.’ So ready as he was to challenge anything which smacked of conventionality or pretension, he was not quite a safe poet to lionize or to ask into mixed company.

But it was less in literature than in art that he influenced his generation, and we must return to the history of the firm. From small beginnings it had established itself in the favourable esteem of the few, and, thanks to exhibitions, its fame was spreading. Though as many as twelve branches are mentioned in a single copy of its prospectus, there was generally one department which for the moment occupied most of the creative energy of the chief.

Painted glass is named first on the prospectus, and was one of the earlier successes of the firm. As it was employed for churches more often than for private houses, it is familiar to many who do not know Morris’s work in their homes; but it is hardly the most characteristic of his activities. For one thing, the material, the ‘pot glass’, was purchased, not made on the premises. Morris’s skill lay in selecting the best colours available rather than in creating them himself. For another, he knew that his own education in figure-drawing was incomplete, and he left this to other artists. Most of the figures were designed by Burne-Jones, and some of the best-known examples of his windows are at St. Philip’s, Birmingham, near the artist’s birthplace, and at St. Margaret’s, Rottingdean, where he died.52 But no cartoon, by Burne-Jones or any one else, was executed till Morris had supervised the colour scheme; and he often designed backgrounds of foliage or landscape.

To those people of limited means who cannot afford tapestries and embroidery (which follow painted glass on the firm’s list), yet who wish to beautify their homes, interest centres in the chintzes and wall-papers. These show the distinctive gifts by which Morris most widely influenced the Victorian traditions. It is not easy to explain why one design stirs our curiosity and quickens our delight, while another has the opposite effect. Critics can prate about natural and conventional art without helping us to understand; but a passage from Mr. Clutton-Brock seems worth quoting as simply and clearly phrased.53 ‘Morris would start’, he says, ‘with a pattern in his mind and from the first saw everything as a factor in that pattern. But in these early wall-papers he showed a power ............