But Morris had dedicated himself, in the face of all discouragements and even of his own inconsistencies, to the transformation of human existence throughout the whole social order. Nothing less than this would do, ‘nor do I consider a man a socialist at all who is not prepared to admit the equality of women as far as condition goes.’ This last phrase sounds like a qualification, but Morris is as clear as spring-water in his condemnation of the marriage and property laws, which made women the slaves of slaves: ‘Whatever is unhappy is immoral. We desire that all should be free to earn their livelihood…with that freedom will come an end of these monstrosities, and a true love between man and woman throughout society.’
To his old friend Charlie Faulkner, who was exercised on the subject and wished to ‘blow off,’ Morris expanded his views a little. ‘Copulation is worse than beastly unless it takes place as the result of natural desire and kindliness on both sides.’ The divorce laws he saw as particularly hard on the poor, who were cooped together for good like fowls going to a market. In a true partnership husband, wife, and children would all be free, the children having their inalienable right of livelihood. A woman would not be considered ‘ruined’ if she followed a natural instinct, and separation would always be by consent, though Morris adds ‘I should hope that in most cases friendship would go along with desire, and would outlive it, and the couple would remain together, but always be free people.’
The most striking thing about this letter, written ten years before Morris’s death, is that he had married Jane Burden in 1859 with much the same convictions. There is no other way to explain the patience of this impatient man during the ‘specially dismal time’ from 1869 to 1873, when his marriage was at breaking point. Whatever the pain of it, Morris regarded Janey as a free agent, because he believed she was truly in love with another man, and love has a right to freedom, and, on the other side, a right to grant it. He left his wife to make her choice because anything else would have been ‘shabby,’ and twenty years later had not changed his mind. ‘A determination to do nothing shabby…appears to me to be the socialist religion, and if it is not morality I do not know what is.’
Contribution to William Morris Today (Catalogue for Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London), 1984
1The head of the Greek community in Victorian London was Constantine Ionides, ‘the Thunderer,’ a wealthy stockbroker and a generous patron of the arts. Mary Zambaco was a granddaughter of the House of Ionides, a wealthy beauty with ‘glorious red hair and almost phosphorescent white skin’ who had left her commonplace husband in Paris in 1866 and come to London. She was also a talented sculptress, with a temperament that Burne-Jones described as ‘like hurricanes and tempests and billows…only it didn’t do in English suburban surroundings.’ In 1868 he made his first attempt to break with her; she threatened to throw herself into the Regent’s Canal. In 1869 he painted her as Phyllis pleading with Demophoön, with the epigraph Dic mihi quod feci? nisi non sapienter amavi (Tell me what I have done, except to love unwisely). Rossetti was in their confidence, writing in 1869 to Jane Morris that Mary had become more beautiful ‘with all her love and trouble…but rainy walks and constant journeys are I fear beginning to break up her health.’
2H. de la Motte Fouqué. The Seasons: Four Romances from the German (English trans: 1843). Sintram and His Companions is the winter romance.
ARTS AND CRAFTS Lasting Impressions
The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure, by William S. Peterson
William Morris did not think the human race was ever likely to solve the question of its own existence, but he wanted society to change in such a way that the question would not be ‘Why were we born to be so miserable?’ but ‘Why were we born to be so happy?’ By 1890 he knew he probably would not see these changes in his lifetime. He felt old, he knew he had diabetes, and he realized that his outstanding natural energy was deserting him. Work was his natural recreation. It was at this point that he turned to the last of his handcrafts, making books.
It was to be ‘a little typographical adventure,’ to see whether he could produce books through traditional craftsmanship ‘which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing.’ At first there was no thought of selling, although later on Morris found he had to do so to meet some of the costs. Characteristically, he spent a year of inquiry and research into how things should be done. With an expert friend, the printer and process engraver Emery Walker, he looked into presses, inks, and handmade papers. (The artist Robin Tanner, lecturing in 1986 at the age of eighty-two, held up a sheet of the paper Morris chose: ‘Listen to it! How it rings! What music!’) New types, of course, had to be designed. For his Golden type Morris turned for a model to fifteenth-century Venice, and for the blackletter Troy to fifteenth-century Germany. What mattered to him most was the total effect of the integrated pages, verso and recto together. Disagreeing fiercely with many other designers, both then and now, he believed that the page should be a solid, brilliant black and white.
Between 1891 and 1898 the Kelmscott Press (named for Morris’s house by the river in Oxfordshire) issued fifty-two wonderful books. Some were illustrated, some had lavish borders and initials designed by Morris himself, some were small, delicate 16mo volumes. The only way to judge them is to hold them and turn the pages. The culmination of the whole series, the great Kelmscott Chaucer, was finished only just in time. In June 1896, after more than three years in production, the sumptuous first copy was put into Morris’s hands. Three months later he was dead. ‘But I cannot believe,’ he had said, ‘that I shall be annihilated.’
This year, 1991, then, is the centenary of the Kelmscott Press, and its history, The Kelmscott Press, has now been written by William Peterson, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, who also, in 1984, produced the bibliography of the press. He says that he suspects more has been written about William Morris than any other printer but Gutenberg. But a great deal of new evidence has become available since the last full-length study, in 1924, by Henry Halliday Sparling, Morris’s unsatisfactory son-in-law. All of it is here, in the clearest, most readable, most scholarly form that anyone could ask for.
First Mr Peterson gives the background of Victorian book production, correcting the notion that the Kelmscott Press arose, without precedents, out of nowhere. He considers the life-giving force of Victorian medievalism and Morris’s part in it, and, on the other hand, Morris’s awkward position as a socialist employer and as a producer of fine books that only the rich could afford. Mr Peterson follows the story of the press itself step by step, with all its improvisations and successes. In a particularly helpful chapter he pauses to give the production history of three individual Kelmscott books—Morris’s own Poems by the Way (1891), The Golden Legend (1892), and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s Love-Lyrics & Songs of Proteus (1892). All these illustrate Morris’s progress as a typographer, and Songs of Proteus, as Mr Peterson says, ‘gives off echoes of very odd psychological resonances’ since Blunt, only a few years earlier, had been the lover of Morris’s wife, Jane.
The history of the press, in fact, is also a history of human emotions and human friendships. Fortunately, Mr Peterson is as interested in these as in the art of the book. He doesn’t let us lose sight of the helpful, patient, skilled craftsman, Emery Walker, who nursed Morris in his last illness; the invaluable but deeply self-satisfied secretary, Sydney Cockerell; and the oldest friend of all, the artist Edward Burne-Jones. If he is capable of unfairness Mr Peterson is perhaps a little unfair to Burne-Jones. True, his delicate, silvery pencil drawings