I. Introduction
IN the next twenty years William Morris established his reputation as a poet, and as a craftsman in the decorative arts. His activities during these years have been described in close on an hundred different books—among the best of which are the first two which were written: J.W. Mackail’s biography and a study by Aymer Vallance. These years are usually regarded as those of his most fruitful achievement. The building of Red House; the establishment and growth of the Firm of Morris & Co.; the writing of The Earthly Paradise and Sigurd the Volsung; the formation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings; and the famous series of public lectures on art and society—all these took place during those twenty years.
It was during these years, also, that Morris’s personality appeared to take confident shape. In place of the shy, self-conscious youth, with his outbreaks of rage or boyish humour, Morris presented a face to the world made up of bluff self-assertive decision, vigorous application to detail, matter-of-fact workmanship. He was damned if he would let anyone take him for an ineffectual aesthete! “I sits with my feet in a brook”, he used to recite,
“And it anyone asks me for why,
I hits him a crock with my crook,
For it’s sentiment kills me, says I.”1
In artistic circles he became familiar, with his rough beard, his disordered hair, his fierce intolerance of fools and fashions—a character resembling the King of Thrace in The Knight’s Tale of his favourite poet, Chaucer:
“Blak was his berd, and manly was his face…
And lyk a griffoun loked he aboute,
With kempe heres on his browes stoute.”
His robust bearing, and a slight roll in his walk, led him to be mistaken more than once for a sailor. He was delighted when he was stopped by a fireman in Kensington High Street, and asked: “Beg pardon, sir, but were you ever Captain of the Sea Swallow?” Acquaintances were amazed at the gusto with which Morris could enter into all the pleasures of life. Madox Brown recalled a period when he sat down regularly to a dinner of roast beef and plum pudding. Visiting him one day at the house of the Firm in Red Lion Square, he saw Morris come on to the landing and roar downstairs: “Mary, those six eggs were bad. I’ve eaten them, but don’t let it happen again.”1 Others were surprised to meet a poet with so straightforward and business-like a manner. Henry James, visiting him in 1869 was impressed “most agreeably”:
“He is short, burly, corpulent, very careless and unfinished in his dress… He has a very loud voice and a nervous restless manner and a perfectly unaffected and businesslike address. His talk indeed is wonderfully to the point and remarkable for clear good sense. He said no one thing that I remember, but I was struck with the very good judgement shown in everything he uttered. He’s an extraordinary example, in short, of a delicate sensitive genius and taste, saved by a perfectly healthy body and temper.”2
Later anecdotes show Morris in one or other of his occupations with the Firm, designing, weaving, wood-engraving or dyeing, as when—
“in the cellars of his old house in Bloomsbury Square… on heavy sabots of French make, aproned from the armpits, with tucked-up shirt-sleeves, his fore-arms dyed up to the elbow, the great man lectured most brilliantly in the high art of dyeing, illustrating his lecture with experiments in the various dyes he wanted for his silks and wools.”1
Finally, he is seen—as he became familiar to the Socialists in the 1880s—greying early, but as brisk and vigorous as in his youth—
“with gray beard like the foam of the sea, with gray hair through which he continually ran his hands erect and curly on his forehead, with a hooked nose, a florid complexion, and clean, clear eyes, dressed in a blue serge coat, and carrying as a rule, a satchel.”2
Such recollections as these do not give us the whole picture of the man. It is not easy to reconcile them (as we shall see) with the pervasive melancholy of Morris’s poetry in the 1860s and early 1870s, nor with the note of despair in some of his more intimate letters. The true picture of Morris during these years must be made up of far more conflict and of more private unhappiness than was revealed in the sturdy public character which he turned towards the world. Nevertheless, throughout the vicissitudes and disappointments of these years, he drew sustaining strength and kept a practical and sane grip on life by means of the constant activities in which he was engaged connected with the famous Firm.
II. Red House and the Firm
After his marriage, Morris turned his attention to building a house which might embody the Palace of Art upon earth. He wished to reject the age of Gradgrind, not only in his opinions and actions, but in his daily surroundings. The architects of the time (he later recalled)—
“could do nothing but produce on the one hand pedantic imitations of classical architecture of the most revolting ugliness, and ridiculous travesties of Gothic buildings, not quite so ugly, but meaner and sillier; and, on the other hand, the utilitarian brick box with a slate lid which the Anglo-Saxon generally in modern times considers as a good sensible house with no nonsense about it.”
Morris and his friends refused to accept such buildings as the inevitable expression of their age. If the romantic revolt had broken through in the fields of literature, could it not also transform their architecture? they asked:
“Were the rows of square brown brick boxes which Keats and Shelley had to look on, or the stuccoed villa which enshrined Tennyson’s genius, to be the perpetual concomitants of such masters of verbal beauty?… was the intelligence of the age to be for ever so preposterously lop-sided? We could see no reason for it, and accordingly our hope was strong; for though we had learned something of the art and history of the Middle Ages, we had not learned enough. It became the fashion among the hopeful artists of the time… to say that in order to have beautiful surroundings there was no need to alter any of the conditions and manners of our epoch; that an easy chair, a piano, a steam-engine, a billiard-table, or a hall fit for a meeting of the House of Commons, had nothing essential in them which compelled us to make them ugly, and that if they had existed in the Middle Ages the people of the time would have made them beautiful.”1
Accordingly, Morris and his friend Philip Webb, the architect, set to build Red House at Bexley Heath in Kent. The house was built, not—as in previous Gothic revivals—in an attempt to combine a number of superficial medieval characteristics which pleased the taste of the architect, but in a definite attempt to adapt late Gothic methods of building to the needs of the nineteenth century. To-day Red House may no longer excite wonder: but in its time it was revolutionary in its unashamed use of red brick, its solid, undisguised construction, and absence of fussy facades and unfunctional ornamentation. A visitor in 1863 described his first reaction on seeing the house as one of “astonished pleasure”:
“The deep red colour, the great sloping, tiled roofs; the small-paned windows; the low, wide porch and massive door; the surrounding garden divided into many squares, hedged by sweetbriar or wild rose, each enclosure with its own particular show of flowers; on this side a green alley with a bowling green, on that orchard walks amid gnarled old fruit-trees; all struck me as vividly picturesque and uniquely original.1
On entering the porch, the same visitor found that the hall “appeared to one accustomed to the narrow ugliness of the usual middle-class dwelling of those days as being grand and severely simple”. A solid oak table stood upon a red tiled floor. Opposite the door a wide oak staircase was placed, with no skirting or cupboard beneath it, so that its construction was unconcealed. The keynote of simplicity and straightforward construction recurred in many rooms: the open roofs: the tall bricked open hearth, without any mantlepiece: the pale distemper on the walls: the black, rush-seated chairs. Side by side with the essential simplicity of the whole, there were to be found examples of rich decoration; painted panels on the solid cabinets: embroidered serge on the walls of the principal bedroom: experiments in ceiling decoration and in stained glass. Burne-Jones declared that Morris was making Red House “the beautifullest place on earth”. There is no cause for surprise that contemporaries saw it as the prototype of a daring new revival.2
It was the need to furnish Red House which led to the formation of the famous Firm. At first it was merely a matter of decorating Morris’s Palace. Morris and Burne-Jones had already tried their hand when furnishing their studio in Red Lion Square. At Red House, Rossetti, Philip Webb, Madox Brown and others were all brought in to help. Burne-Jones, who had already undertaken one or two commissions for stained glass, now set to work on painted tiles for the fireplaces. Morris designed flower patterns in wool for the walls. Webb designed table-glass, metal candlesticks, and furniture. The successes of the small group made them think of more ambitious projects. In Rossetti’s recollection, the actual origin of the Firm was in a casual discussion:
“One evening a lot of us were together, and we got talking about the way in which artists did all kinds of things in olden times, designed every kind of decoration and most kinds of furniture, and some one suggested—as a joke more than anything else—that we should each put down five pounds and form a company. Fivers were blossoms of a rare growth among us in those days, and I won’t swear that the table bristled with fivers. Anyhow the firm was formed, but of course there was.no deed or anything of that kind. In fact, it was a mere playing at business, and Morris was elected manager, not because we ever dreamed he would turn out a man of business, but because he was the only one among us who had both time and money to spare. We had no idea whatever of commercial success, but it succeeded almost in our own despite.”1
Burne-Jones recalled rather more of conscious decision on Morris’s part. His income from the copper mines was diminishing fast: his apprenticeship as a painter had not been an unmixed success: he was forced to consider some practical means of earning a living without compromising with the age. On every side it was apparent that the minor arts were “in a state of complete degradation” (he recalled in 1883), and accordingly “with the conceited courage of a young man I set myself to reform all that”.2
In its origin, then, the Firm had both a private and a public significance. In its private significance, it was the last and most ambitious attempt to project the old “Brotherhood” into life, to build a world of art in the face of the nineteenth century. This attitude persisted in Morris’s mind for several years, and found expression in 1865 when it was planned to extend Red House into a great quadrangle, in which the workshops of the Firm would be housed, and Burne-Jones (now married to “Georgie” MacDonald) should live. When this plan fell through, Morris, who was recovering at this time from an attack of rheumatic fever, was plunged into dejection and wrote to his friend:
“As to our palace of art, I confess your letter was a blow to me at first… in short, I cried, but I have got over it now; of course, I see it from your point of view but I like the idea of not giving it up for good even if it is delusive.”1
Shortly afterwards Morris and the Firm moved into a convenient house in Queen Square, and left Red House, never to return.
From this time onwards the public significance of the Firm became all-important for Morris—the attempt to “reform all that”, to reform a philistine age by means of the decorative arts; and, as a first step, to reform the arts themselves. The first circular of the Firm (drafted, most probably, by Rossetti) proposed self-confidently to undertake work in “any species of decoration, mural or otherwise, from pictures, properly so called, down to the consideration of the smallest work of art beauty”.2 Branches of work offered included Mural Decoration, Carving, Stained Glass, Metal Work, as well as Jewellery, Furniture and Embroidery.
In an article published shortly after Morris’s death Walter Crane3 characterized this movement as—
“in the main a revival of the medieval spirit (not the letter) in design; a return to simplicity, to sincerity; to good materials and sound work-manship; to rich and suggestive surface decoration, and simple constructive forms.”1
Since the Great Exhibition of 1851, domestic decoration and furniture had fallen under the Second Empire taste in upholstery, the “antithesis of the new English movement”. The impulse towards Greek and Roman forms (Walter Crane wrote)—
“which had held sway with designers since the French Revolution, appeared to be dead. The elegant lines and limbs of quasi-classical couches and chairs… had grown gouty and clumsy, in the hands of Victorian upholsterers… An illustrated catalogue of the exhibition of 1851 will sufficiently indicate the monstrosities in furniture and decoration which were supposed to be artistic. The last stage of decomposition had been reached, and a period of, perhaps, unexampled hideousness in furniture, dress and decoration set in which lasted the life of the second empire, and fitly perished with it. Relics of the period I believe are still to be discovered in the cold shade of remote drawing-rooms, and ‘apartments to let’, which take the form of big looking-glasses, and machine-lace curtains, and where the furniture is afflicted with curvature of the spine, and dreary lumps of bronze and ormulu repose on marble slabs at every opportunity, where monstrosities of every kind are encouraged under glass shades, while every species of design-debauchery is indulged in upon carpets, curtains, chintzes and wallpapers, and where the antimacassar is made to cover a multitude of sins. When such ideas of decoration prevailed, having their origin or prototypes, in the vapid splendours of imperial saloons, and had to be reduced to the scale of the ordinary citizen’s house and pocket, the thing became absurd as well as hideous. Besides, the cheap curly legs of the uneasy chairs and couches came off, and the stuffed seats, with a specious show of padded comfort, were delusions and snares. Long ago the old English house-place with its big chimney-corner had given way to the bourgeois arrangement of dining and drawing-room… The parlour had become a kind of sanctuary veiled in machine-lace, where the lightness of the curtains was compensated for by the massiveness of their poles, and where Berlin wool-work and bead mats flourished.”2
The building of Red House, and the unorthodox methods by which it was decorated and furnished—this was all well so long as it remained a rich man’s private hobby. But when the Firm challenged the established trade in the public market, it was bound to provoke the fierce opposition of philistine taste and vested interests. The amount of prejudice which the Firm aroused, wrote Aymer Vallance, “would scarcely be believed at the present time.”
“The announcement came with the provocation and force of a challenge, and dumbfounded those who read it at the audacity of the venture… Professionals felt themselves aggrieved at the intrusion, as they regarded it, of a body of men whose training had not been strictly commercial into the close premises of their own particular domain; and, had it been possible to form a ring and exclude Messrs. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. from the market, the thing would infallibly have been done.”1
As it was, the early expansion of the business was hindered not only by philistinism amongst the only public wealthy enough to buy the Firm’s products, but by the active hostility of the trade. This was one of the factors which caused the Firm to specialize in its first years in particular in ecclesiastical work, where little rivalry existed. At the 1862 Exhibition, where the Firm presented some of its first work, opponents went so far as to start a petition to get the exhibits disqualified, maintaining amongst other things that the stained glass was a fraud, and was old glass re-touched. It was not until 1867 that the Firm obtained an important commission to decorate a non-ecclesiastical building—the Green Dining Room at the South Kensington Museum.
As the Firm expanded, it became the spear-head of a movement which challenged the fussy and pretentious in one field after another of decorative art. Walter Crane (looking back on the half-century) described some of the points of conflict:
“The simple, black-framed, old English Buckinghamshire elbow-chair, with its rush-bottomed seat, was substituted for the wavy-backed and curly-legged stuffed chair of the period, with its French polish and concealed, and often very unreliable, construction. Bordered Eastern rugs and fringed Axminster carpets, on plain or stained boards, or India matting, took the place of the stuffy planned carpet; rich, or simple, flat patterns acknowledged the wall, and expressed the proportion of the room, instead of trying to hide both under bunches of sketchy roses and vertical stripes; while, instead of the big plate-glass mirror, with ormulu frame, which had long reigned over the cold white marble mantlepiece, small bevelled glasses were inserted in the panelling of the high wood mantleshelf, or hung over it in convex circular form. Slender black wood or light brass curtain-rods, and curtains to match the coverings, or carry out the colour of the room, displaced the heavy mahogany and ormulu battering-rams, with their fringed and festooned upholstery, which had hitherto overshadowed the window of the so-called comfortable classes. Plain white or green paint for interior wood-work drove graining and marbleing to the public-house; blue and white Nankin, Delft, or Gres de Flandres routed Dresden and Sevres from the cabinet; plain oaken boards and trestles were prefered before the heavy mahogany telescopic British dining table of the mid-nineteenth century, and the deep, high backed, canopied settle with loose cushions ousted the castored and padded couch from the fireside.”1
By the 1870s the Firm was not only well established: it was beginning to set the pace among wealthy circles where any claim was made to cultivation. Even the fiercest opponents were forced to alter their designs, and to adapt some of the minor superficial characteristics of the Firm’s work to their own.2 In short, Morris and Co. (for the original partnership was broken up with some acrimony in 1874, and Morris—still with the assistance of Burne-Jones and Philip Webb—took sole command) had become fashionable: and, moreover, the revolt had begun to bring rich returns in the form of commercial success.3
If Morris had been concerned only with the effecting of some reform within the decorative arts, it would seem that at the end of the 1870s he might have rested satisfied. In fact, it was exactly at this time that his bitter discontent found its expression in his famous lectures on art and society. For the reform for which he looked went beyond his own practice of the arts; these arts were the forum which his early revolt had chosen, in which to conduct the “holy warfare against the age”. But on every side the age remained undismayed. His work had opened many new vistas in the decorative arts; but at the end of each one he was faced by the soiled, utilitarian chimneys, and the facts of mass production of shoddy goods for profit. By means of his own private income, and with the assistance of a clientele made up variously of enterprising men of wealth, nostalgic parsons, and persons of genuine sensitivity and taste, he might widen for a moment the charmed circle of his art. But, outside that circle, the age remained indifferent or hostile as before, so that he was impelled to write to Andreas Scheu in 1883:
“In spite of all the success I have had, I have not failed to be conscious that the art I have been helping to produce would fall with the death of a few of us who really care about it, that a reform in art which is founded on individualism must perish with the individuals who have set it going. Both my historical studies and my practical conflict with the philistinism of modern society have forced on me the conviction that art cannot have a real life and growth under the present system of commercialism and profit-mongering.”1
It was his success, rather than any failure, which brought him into conflict with his age.
III. Morris as a Designer and Craftsman
During the early stages of the Firm Morris was too busy to concern himself with this kind of problem. He and his friends had engaged upon a considerable venture—the establishment of a company of artists and craftsmen who intended to revive the minor arts of England, on a sound financial basis and in the face of an age of shoddy. Morris took upon himself the major responsibility. He was one of the Firm’s principal designers, the main link between the other designers and the craftsmen who executed their designs and the man responsible for much of the day-to-day business management.1
From the very outset, Morris showed that he had taken to heart John Ruskin’s works:
“It would be well if all of us were good handicraftsmen in some kind, and the dishonour of manual labour done away with altogether… In each several profession, no master should be too proud to do its hardest work.”
Disturbing as such a doctrine was to the servant-supported middle-class, it was inescapable in the work Morris had on hand. In the view of W.R. Lethaby, one of the “Morris group”, there were two quite different currents of “Gothic revival” among the architects and designers of the nineteenth century. The fashionable one, represented by men like Sir Gilbert Scott-
“for the most part… followed the movement—backward—of attempting to ‘revive the Gothic style of design’ rather than settling down to perfect a science of modern building.”
To Ruskin and the group around Morris and Philip Webb, the architecture “to which we gave the modern name ‘Gothic’ was the customary way in which masons and carpenters did their work”. In their view, an “Architecture of Aristocracy”,1 originating at the time of the Renaissance and coming to dominance in the eighteenth century, had destroyed these natural manners of work. “The national arts were flattened out and destroyed in the name of gentility, learning, and ‘taste’.” The two schools of nineteenth-century medievalists, can therefore be sharply distinguished. The fashionable architects attempted to impose a superficial Gothic style upon their work, copying interesting Gothic features, often disregarding both structure and modern requirements. Philip Webb and Morris and their group, on the other hand, were concerned with the manner of work in the Middle Ages, with the handling of materials by the medieval builder and craftsman, with substance and structure rather than with “style”.
This distinction can be clearly seen in all Morris’s work as a designer. While he may have occasionally fallen into the faults of the first attitude, the essence of his approach was in the second. Looking back upon his work, he told a Clarion interviewer in 1892:
“I have tried to produce goods which should be genuine so far as their mere substances are concerned, and should have on that account the primary beauty in them which belongs to naturally treated natural substances; have tried for instance to make woollen substances as woollen as possible, cotton as cotton as possible, and so on; have used only the dyes which are natural and simple, because they produce beauty almost without the intervention of art; all this quite apart from the design in the stuffs or what not.”2
Since many of the arts in which the Firm commenced to work were—to all intents—extinct in England, Morris had no alternative but to concern himself with the substance of the arts and the practical details of the craftsman’s work first ot all.
From the foundation of the Firm until the end of his life, Morris was continually busy with close study, experiments, and practical engagements with the materials of his craft. Glass-firing, the glazing of tiles, embroidery, woodcutting and engraving, pottery and book-binding, weaving and tapestry-work, illuminating—all these were among the skills he mastered to a greater or lesser degree. Characteristic of his thorough application was his determination in the mid-1870s to revive the use of vegetable dyes. For months the problem absorbed his mind, and he studied the question in old books and in the London museums. He experimented at his own dye-vat, and his mind was running on it even during his favourite relaxation:
“I was at Kelmscott the other day, and betwixt fishing, I cut a handful of poplar twigs and boiled them, and dyed a lock of wool a very good yellow…”1
Next, he paid visits to Leek, in Staffordshire, where at a large dye-works he could experiment on a larger scale, and gain the advice of workmen who remembered using the old dyes in their youth. From here he wrote to Georgie Burne-Jones:
“I shall be glad to get back to the dye-house at Leek to-morrow. I dare say you will notice how bad my writing is; my hand is so shaky with doing journey-man’s work the last few days: delightful work, hard for the body and easy for the mind. For a great heap of skein-wool has come for me and more is coming: and yesterday evening we set our blue-vat the last thing before coming here. I should have liked you to see the charm work on it: we dyed a lock of wool bright blue in it, and left the liquor a clear primrose colour, so all will be ready for dyeing to-morrow…”2
“His way was to tackle the thing with his own hands”, recalled Walter Crane—
“and so he worked at the vat, like the practical man he was in these matters. An old friend tells the story of his calling at the works one day and, on inquiring for the master, hearing a strong cheery voice call out from some inner den, Tm dyeing, I’m dyeing, I’m dyeing,’ and the well-known, robust figure of the craftsman presently appeared in his shirtsleeves, his hands stained blue from the vat.”1
The problem had at last been solved to his satisfaction.
Morris was also a first-rate scholar in the history of the decorative arts. Study and practice he regarded as inseparable. This union was expressed in his own experiments in tapestry weaving. Here he found no living craftsmen to learn from. Gobelins, the old French centre, he declared had degenerated into a “hatching-nest of stupidity”. After close study, he set up a handloom in the bedroom of his Hammersmith house. There he worked from one of his own embroidery patterns, and wove—
“a piece of ornament with my own hands, the chief merit of which, I take it, lies in the fact that I learned the art of doing it with no other help than what I could get from a very little eighteenth century book.”2
This constant interplay of study and practice gave him his great authority in all the decorative arts. “They talk of building museums for the public”, he once said:
“but South Kensington Museum was really got together for about six people—I am one, and another is a comrade [Philip Webb] in the room.”3
When called before the Royal Commission for Technical Instruction in 1882 he remarked of the same museum, “perhaps I have used it as much as any man living”. Testimony to the regard in which his knowledge was held can be seen in the fact that he was consulted by the Museum as a professional referee when important purchases in tapestries and textiles were to be made.1 “Went to S.K.M. yesterday”, he noted in his diary of a visit to the Museum in January, 1887—
“to look at the Tray tapestry again since they have bought it for £1250: I chuckled to think that properly speaking it was bought for me, since scarcely anybody will care a damn for it.”2
In his lectures and papers on the decorative arts delivered in the 1880s—in such a lecture as “The History of Pattern Designing”—he reveals the astonishing body of knowledge which he had acquired during these years of his most active practice within the minor arts: knowledge derived from close study of Ancient, Egyptian, Byzantine, Persian, Indian, and Northern European and English traditions in particular.
This study of the traditions of the past he held to be essential for any designer. “My view is”, he declared before the Royal Commission for Technical Instruction—
“that it is not desirable to divide the labour between the artist and what is technically called the designer, and I think it desirable on the whole that the artist and designer should practically be one… There are two chief things that would have to be thought of, in providing facilities for study for the art of design. However original a man may be, he cannot afford to disregard the works of art that have been produced in times past when design was flourishing; he is bound to study old examples, but he is also bound to supplement that by a careful study of nature, because” if he does not he will certainly fall into a sort of cut and dried, conventional method of designing… It takes a man of considerable originality to deal with the old examples and to get what is good out of them, without making a design which lays itself open distinctly to the charge of plagiarism.’
But Morris’s interest did not stop short with the mastery of the designer’s work:
“What I want to see really is, and that is the bottom of the whole thing, an education all round of the workmen, from the lowest to the highest, in technical matters as in others…”
While Morris was interested in the quality of the art products themselves, he was equally interested in the manner in which these products were made, and in the people who made them. On the one hand, he deprecated the separation between the artist in his studio and the technical designer to whom nothing was left but the “grinding work” of adapting the design to the lathe or the loom. In textiles:
“I think it would be better… that the man who actually goes through the technical work of counting the threads, and settling how the thing is to be woven, through and through, should do the greater part of the drawing.”
On the other hand, he desired that the man who executed the work should be given opportunity to exercise his own creative abilities. Of all the principles which Morris shared with Ruskin, this was the most difficult to put into operation. Certainly, many attempts were made, and as the Firm expanded and the Merton Abbey works were established, a method of work was built up distinct from normal commercial practice. In several branches of work experienced craftsmen were engaged from the beginning, who taught Morris their business, and worked side by side with him in all experiments. When apprentices were taken on, a point was made of not seeking out the exceptionally gifted and outstanding lad; it was taken for granted that any intelligent lad had the makings of an artist and craftsman in him. This was especially justified in the case of the tapestry work at Merton Abbey, where on Morris’s death—not twenty years after he had revived the art with an old book and a handloom—a body of skill had been trained up adequate to ensure the art’s continuance. Morris was gratified to be able to say of one piece which was exhibited at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1893:
“The people who made it—and this is by tar the most interesting thing about it—are boys, at least they are grown up by this time-entirely trained in our own shop. It is really freehand work, remember, not slavishly copying a pattern… and they came to us with no knowledge of drawing whatever, and have learnt every single thing under our training. And most beautifully they have done it!”1
Carpet-making, weaving, jewellery and metal-work, glass-making—all provided some opportunity for the exercise of the craftsman’s creative initiative; while the atmosphere in every branch of the Firm was one which tended to draw out the workman’s initiative and intellectual powers. But, looking back upon his results in 1892, it was here that Morris felt that his achievements had most fallen short:
“Except with a small part of the more artistic side of the work,” he told a Clarion reporter, “I could not do anything (or at least but little) to give this pleasure to the workman, because I should have had to change their methods of work so utterly that I should have disqualified them from earning their living elsewhere. You see I have got to understand thoroughly the manner of work under which the art of the Middle Ages was done, and that that is the only manner of work which can turn out popular art, only to discover that it is impossible to work in that manner in this profit-grinding society.”2
This practical work—directing, experimenting, above all designing—must be remembered as the constant background to all other activities of Morris from the formation of the Firm until the end of his life. “It is very characteristic of Morris”, wrote Edward Carpenter on his death, “that his chief recreation was only another kind of work.”1 The volume of this work was prodigious. In 1881, when he was giving up much time to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and to the National Liberal League, such an entry as this in his diary is by no means exceptional: “Up at 6.15. 2½ hours tapestry. Then pointing carpet: to S.P.A.B. in afternoon: then to N.L.L. meeting.”2 Most of his tapestry work was done in this way, before the main business of his day had started. During his most active period as a Socialist propagandist, the work had sometimes to be laid aside for weeks at a time; but nevertheless it was still fermenting in his mind. On the back and at the bottom of his lecture notes there are often found the leaf designs and experiments in lettering, which indicate that the Kelmscott Press was already occupying a part of his thoughts.
Morris set down the principles which guided him in his pattern designing in two essays in his later life, and in these several precepts frequently recur:
“The aim should be to combine clearness of form and firmness of structure with the mystery which comes of abundance and richness of detail… Do not introduce any lines or objects which cannot be explained by the structure of the pattern; it is just this logical sequence of form, this growth which looks as if… it would not have been otherwise, which prevents the eye wearying of the repetition of the pattern… Do not be afraid of large patterns.
“The geometrical structure of the pattern, which is a necessity in all recurring patterns, should be boldly insisted upon, so as to draw the eye from accidental figures…
“Above all things, avoid vagueness; run any risk of failure rather than involve yourselves in a tangle of poor weak lines that people can’t make out. Definite form bounded by firm outline is a necessity for all ornament… Rational growth is necessary to all patterns… Take heed in this growth that each member of it be strong and crisp, that the lines do not get thready or flabby or too far from their stock to sprout firmly and vigorously; even where a line ends it should look as if it had plenty of capacity for more growth if so it would… Out-landishness is a snare… Those natural forms which are at once most familiar and most delightful to us, as well from association as from beauty, are the best for our purpose. The rose, the lily, the tulip, the oak, the vine, and all the herbs and trees that even we cockneys know about, they will serve our turn…”
In the same essays he emphasized his preference for pictorial suggestion or direct expression, which was pushed to its extreme in his late tapestry-work with Burne-Jones:
“You may be sure that any decoration is futile, and has fallen into at least the first stage of degradation, when it does not remind you of something beyond itself, of something of which it is but a visible symbol.
“I am bound to say that… I, as a Western man and a picture-lover, must still insist on plenty of meaning in your patterns; I must have unmistakable suggestions of gardens and fields, and strange trees, boughs, and tendrils, or I can’t do with your pattern, but must take the first piece of nonsense-work a Kurdish shepherd has woven from tradition and memory; all the more, as even in that there will be some hint of past history.”1
These passages reveal clearly the leading characteristics of Morris’s designs. In the opinion of his colleague, W.R. Lethaby the architect:
‘‘They stand supreme in modern pattern work, and will necessarily remain supreme until as. great a man as Morris again deals with that manner of expression with his full force as he did… Even the most formal of his work recalls to us the strong growth of healthy vegatation … Others, more directly, speak in ordered pattern-language, of a flower-embroidered field; of willow boughs seen against the sky; of intertwined jessamine and whitethorn, of roses climbing against a background of yew; of branching pomegranate, lemon and peach, of a rose trellised arbour in a garden…”
Nearly all his designs show the same vigour and boldness, both in the strong recurring lines, and heavy curling leaves, and in their unashamed use of bright colour (“If you want mud, you can find that in the street”, he told an important customer who thought his colours were not sufficiently “subdued”): copious in their luxuriant growth and foliage: suggestive in their pictorial detail. His years of research into the problems of dyeing brought their reward. In Lethaby’s opinion:
“Even in the choice of single colours, reds, greens, yellows, Morris’s mastery appears; if it be kermes and indigo in dyes, or red lead and yellow ochre in pigments, he looked on these colours when pure as in themselves beautiful natural products, the individuality and flavour of which would be destroyed by too much mixing.”1
Everything which left his hand, or which had been produced at the Firm under his eye, reveals the excellence of materials and of workmanship.
Shoddy—that was his enemy. “It is a shoddy age”, he once shouted in his last years. “Shoddy is king. From the statesman to the shoemaker, all is shoddy.”2 The Firm fought shoddy from start to finish, and nothing it turned out could come under this accusation. In his work as a designer Morris desired to combine two things: sound workmanship on good materials, and richness of decorative detail. In his first objective, simplicity and good quality, he was the main pioneer of that trend which is continued in the best design of our own day. If he is taken to task to-day by some critics for over-elaboration and sweetness in some of his work—for the heavy and intricate ornamental lines of some of his later wallpapers and chintzes—yet it is still Morris himself who first laid down both the text and the practice on which his critics stand. Moreover, it should be remembered that Morris’s second objective (that of richness of decoration) could only be reached by finding customers among the wealthiest class. Here he was subject to a constant sense of impatience and irritation which was one of the forces impelling him forwards to Socialist conclusions. His brusqueness of manner with his customers, and his steadfast refusal to compromise the standards of his art, became famous and even made his Firm a centre of fashionable curiosity. As Rossetti once remarked: “Top’s very eccentricities and independent attitude towards his patrons seem to have drawn patrons round him.”1 But it was only to be expected that younger designers who followed him would turn away from such difficult customers as these, with their freakish fashions and desire for ostentation, and in consequence, would turn aside from the extravagance of some of Morris’s work, which—while not compromising in any way with the philistinism of his patrons—nevertheless was planned in a grand and costly manner, and was suited to large rooms and long perspectives. Towards the end of his life, Morris remarked to Edward Carpenter (moved for a moment by the simplicity of the life he found in Carpenter’s cottage at Millthorpe):
“I have spent, I know, a vast amount of time designing furniture and wall-papers, carpets and curtains; but after all I am inclined to think that sort of thing is mostly rubbish, and I would prefer for my part to live with the plainest whitewashed walls and wooden chairs and tables.”2
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1 Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams (1916), p. 216.
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1 Ford Madox Hueffer, Ancient Lights (1911), pp. 3–4.
2 Letters of Henry James, Vol. I, pp. 16–18.
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1 E. Magnusson, “William Morris”, Cambridge Review, November 26th, 1896.
2Hueffer, op. cit., p. 18.
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1 “The Revival of Architecture”, Works, Vol. XXII, pp. 321–3.
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1 See Aymer Vallance, William Morris, His Art, His Writings, and His Public Life (1897), p. 49.
2 See Nicolaus Pevsner, Pioneer of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), pp. 65–6.
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1 Theodore Watts-Dunton in the Athanaeum, October 10th, 1896.
2 Letters, p. 186. See also Memorials, I, p. 213.
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1 Letters, p. 22.
2 See Mackail, I, pp. 150–2, for the full circular.
3 Walter Crane was not an early associate of the Firm. At the time when it was founded he was apprenticed as an engraver to W.J. Linton, the old Chartist and Republican. See Walter Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences (1907), p. 46.
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1 Scribner’s Magazine, July, 1897.
2 Walter Crane, William Morris to Whistler (1911), pp. 51–3.
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1 Vallance, op. cit, p. 58.
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1 Scribner’s Magazine, July, 1897.
2 See Crane, op. cit., p. 55. For Peter Floud’s opinion that “Morris must be regarded not as a revolutionary pioneer and innovator, but rather as the great classical designer of his age”, see Listener, October 7th, 1954 and Postscript below.
3 But for Morris’s “financial crisis” in the late 1860s, see J. Le Bourgeois, Durham Univ. Journal, LXVI, 1974.
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1 Letters, p. 187.
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1 For example, in the Firm’s work in stained glass, the designs of Burne-Jones and Madox Brown came normally to Morris in the form of plain, uncoloured cartoons. It was his task to mark the lead-lines, to select the colours, sometimes to design the background, etc. This could not be done without the most thorough understanding of the processes of painting and firing the glass, which he gained by working at the small kiln constructed in the Firm’s basement at Red Lion Square. To gain an idea of his complete mastery of the techniques of glass-firing and staining, see his letter to John Ruskin,Letters, pp. 168–9. See also Life and Letters of Frederick Shields, p. 98.
The letters of Warington Taylor (business manager of the firm between 1865 and 1869) to Philip Webb (printed in Philip Webb and his Work by W.R. Lethaby) provide an amusing commentary on Morris’s qualities (or lack of them) in the financial affairs of the Firm. See also Philip Henderson, William Morris (1973 edn.), pp. 105–112.
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1 W.R. Lethaby, Philip Webb and his Work (1935). See esp. Ch. V.
2 Clarion, November 19th, 1892.
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1 Mackail, I, p. 315. Letters, pp. 65–6.
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1 Scribner’s Magazine, July, 1897.
2 Letter of Morris in the Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological Society, April 5th, 1893, quoted in the History of the Merton Tapestry Works by EG Marrillier, p. 16.
3 Lethaby, op. cit, pp. 39–40.
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1 I am indebted to the Keeper of the Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum for the information that a number of Morris’s professional reports are still in his files.
2 Socialist Diary, 1887, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45335.
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1 Morris’s evidence before the Royal Commission (1882) is reprinted in full in May Morris, I, pp. 205–25.
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1 Quoted by Vallance, op. cit, p. 121.
2 Clarion, November 19th, 1892.
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1 Freedom, November, 1896.
2 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45407.
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1 See “Textiles” (1888), May Morris, I, pp. 244–51; “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing” (1881), Works, Vol. XXII, pp. 175–205; “Textile Fabrics” (1884), Works, Vol. XXII, pp. 270–94.
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1 W.R. Lethaby, William Morris as Work-Master (1901).
2 Clarion, November 19th, 1892.
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1 T. Watts-Dunton’s recollections in The English Review, January, 1909.
2 Carpenter, op. cit, p. 217.