The last section of the book is left for the late romances, on which so much work has been done in the past few years. As always, Joyce Tompkins is thorough, discussing in detail the neglected Child Christopher and Fair Goldilind and the unfinished Desiderius and Killian of the Closes. One of her main concerns is to rescue Morris’s land-wights, sending-boats and magic islands from a rigid political interpretation. Both the young Morris and the harassed middle-aged socialist looking back on his former self can, she thinks, be recognized here. The stories ‘testify to the constant habits of his imagination.’
London Review of Books, 1988
Something Sweet to Come
An introduction to The Novel on Blue Paper, by William Morris
The novel that William Morris began to write early in 1872 is unfinished and unpublished and also untitled. I have called it The Novel on Blue Paper because it was written on blue lined foolscap, and Morris preferred to call things what they were.
The only firsthand information we have about it is a letter that Morris wrote to Louie Baldwin, Georgie Burne-Jones’s sister, on 12 June 1872.
Dear Louie,
Herewith I send by book-post my abortive novel: it is just a specimen of how not to do it, and there is no more to be said thereof: ’tis nothing but landscape and sentiment: which thing won’t do. Since you wish to read it, I am sorry ’tis such a rough copy, which roughness sufficiently indicates my impatience at having to deal with prose. The separate parcel, paged 1 to 6, was a desperate dash at the middle of the story to try to give it life when I felt it failing: it begins with the letter of the elder brother to the younger on getting his letter telling how he was going to bid for the girl in marriage. I found it in the envelope in which I had sent it to Georgie to see if she could give me any hope: she gave me none, and I have never looked at it since. So there’s an end of my novel-writing, I fancy, unless the world turns topsides under some day. Health and merry days to you, and believe me to be
Your affectionate friend,
William Morris
The tone of gruff modesty, and in particular the catchphrase from Dickens (the Circumlocution Office’s ‘How Not to Do It’), is habitual to Morris and can be taken for what it is worth. In spite of the disapproval of Georgiana Burne-Jones, whose opinion he valued at the time above all others, he did not destroy his MS, but kept it, and after what was presumably further discouragement from Louie, he kept it still. He must have been aware, too, why he had been given no hope. J. W. Mackail tells us, in his Life of Morris (1899), that Morris ‘had all the instinct of a born man of letters for laying himself open in his books, and having no concealment from the widest circle of all,’ and (of the Prologues to The Earthly Paradise) that there is ‘an autobiography so delicate and so outspoken that it must needs be left to speak for itself.’ That, we have to conclude, was the trouble with the novel on blue paper; it did speak for itself, but much too plainly.
The background of the novel—the ‘landscape’—is the Upper Thames valley, the water meadows, streams, and villages round about Kelmscott on the borders of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Morris had gone down to inspect Kelmscott Manor House in May 1871, and in June he entered into a joint tenancy of the old house with Rossetti at £60 a year. The grey gables, flagged path, enclosed garden cram-full of flowers, lime and elm trees ‘populous with rooks,’ white-panelled parlour, are all recognizably described in this novel, although Morris when he wrote it had never spent a summer there. It was the house he loved ‘with a reasonable love, I think.’ Rossetti, not a countryman, had hoped that the place would be good for his nerves. But in the seclusion of the marshes his obsession with the beauty of Jane Morris, and his compulsion to paint her again and again, reached the point of melancholy mania. Morris had a business to run and was obliged to be in London a good deal. The seemingly intolerable tension arose between the three of them that has been so often and so painfully traced by biographers. To Morris it was ‘this failure of mine.’ Mackail, cautiously describing the subject of the novel as ‘the love of two brothers for the same woman,’ evidently saw no farther into it than the failure. Once, however, when I was trying to explain the situation, and its projection as myth, to a number of overseas students, one of them asked a question that I have never seen in any biography: ‘Why then did Morris not strike Rossetti?’
I hope to show that this question is very relevant to the novel on blue paper. Certainly Morris was not ‘above,’ or indifferent to, his loss. It is a mistake to refer to his much later opinions, as reported by Shaw (‘Morris was a complete fatalist in his attitude towards the conduct of all human beings where sex was concerned’) or Luke Ionides (‘Women did not seem to count with him’) or Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (‘He was the only man I ever came in contact with who seemed absolutely independent of sex considerations’). It is a mistake, too, to refer to opinions expressed in News from Nowhere to his ‘restless heart’ of 1868—73. Which of us would like to be judged, at thirty-nine, by our frame of mind at the age of fifty-seven? Morris himself knew this well enough. ‘At the age of more than thirty years,’ he wrote in Killian of the Closes (1895), ‘men are more apt to desire what they have not than they that be younger or older.’
And Morris might have been pressed into a violent demonstration at this time by yet another cruel test, the profoundly unsettling behaviour of his greatest friend, Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones had been married since 1860 to Georgie, the charming, tiny, and indomitable daughter of a Methodist minister. The Neds had started out in lodgings with £30 between them, and their happy and stable marriage, together with Burne-Jones’s designs for the Firm, were part of the very earth out of which Morris’s life and work took growth. But in 1867 the quiet Ned suddenly claimed, much more openly than Rossetti, the freedom to love unchecked. He had been totally captivated by a most tempestuous member of the Greek community in London, Mary Zambaco. Of this radiantly sad and unpredictable young woman he drew the loveliest by far of his pencil portraits; ‘I believed it to be all my future life,’ he told Rossetti. The affair came and went and came again, to the fury of Ionides and the sympathetic interest of the Greek women. It lingered on, indeed, until 1873.1 Morris, stalwart, stood by his friend, but the effect of this new confounding of love and loyalty, on top of his own ‘failure,’ must have been hard to master; the effect of Mary herself can be guessed at, perhaps, from the strange intrusion of one of the characters, Eleanor, into the novel on blue paper.
Meanwhile, Georgie was left to manage her life and her two children as best she could. In his loneliness and bewilderment Morris felt deeply for her, and at this time he was unquestionably in love with her.
Some of his drafts and manuscript poems of 1865—70 show this without disguise, though always with a chivalrous anxiety. He must not intrude; he thanks her because she ‘does not deem my service sin.’ A pencil note reads on one draft ‘we two are in the same box and need conceal nothing—scold me but pardon me.’ He is ‘late made wise’ to his own feelings, and can only trust that time will transform them into the friendship that will bring him peace. Meanwhile the dignity and sincerity with which she is bearing ‘the burden of thy grief and wrong’ is enough, in itself, to check him.
…nor joy nor grief nor fear
Silence my love; but those grey eyes and clear
Truer than truth pierce through my weal and woe…
Georgie, in fact, was steadfast to her marriage, and strong enough to wait. ‘I know one thing,’ she wrote to her friend Rosalind Howard, ‘and that is that there is love enough between Edward and me to last out a long life if it is given us.’
In the meantime, what was Morris’s