It is easy to call him a visionary; but visionaries are necessary to every great movement, because they alone can give it direction, and they alone can make men desire the goal towards which they move. It is not enough to preach peace by talking of the horrors of war; for men are so made that they prefer horrors to dullness. You must persuade them that peace means a fuller and more glorious life than war, if you would make them desire it passionately. Morris said that our present society was in a state of economic war, and that for that reason it was anxious, joyless and impotent, like the life of a savage tribe engaged in incessant vendettas. The economic peace which he desired was one in which men would have leisure and power to do all that was best worth doing; and he hoped to bring that peace about by filling them with his own desire to do what was best worth doing. And as the saint affects men more by his vision of Heaven than the ecclesiastics affect them with all their organisation and discipline, so, it may be, Morris has done more for Socialism than all the scientific Socialists. For he knew quite clearly what he wanted in life and no one can say that he wanted what was not desirable. The world distrusts philanthropists and reformers of all kinds because they do not in their own lives convince the world that they are good judges of happiness. If they want us to be like themselves, we look at them and decide that we do not want to be like them. But no one could know Morris or his way of life without wanting to be like him. No one could say that he set out to reform the world without having first made a good business of life himself. When he tells us how to be happy and why we miss happiness he speaks with authority and not as the philanthropists; indeed, his ideas of what life should be commend themselves to us even without his authority, and there are many now who share them without knowing their origin.
8. Ariadne, 1870. Polished ceramic tile. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
9. Angels, undated. Tile Panel. St John the Baptist Church, Findon, Sussex.
10. Edward Burne-Jones and Lucy Faulkner, Cinderella, 1863. Tile panel, overglazed polychrome decoration on tin-glazed Dutch earthenware blanks in ebonized oak frame, 71 × 153 cm. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
11. Venus, 1870. Miniature. Ink, gouache and guilding on paper, 27.9 × 21.6 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
12. Anonymous, Nobleman (probably Wolfert Van Borssel) from the Metamorphoses, late 15th century. Parchment, 45 × 33.5 cm. Private collection, Bruges.
There was a time when the world was more interested in Morris’s ideas than in Morris himself, and his influence was greater than his name. In his art he affected the art of all Europe so profoundly that what he did alone seems to be only the product of his age. As a poet he is commonly thought of as the last and most extreme of the romantics; but his later poetry, at least, is quite free from the romantic despair of reality and nearly all of it is free from romantic vagueness. When Morris described the world that is not, he was, as it were, making plans of the world as he wished it to be; and he was always concerned with the future even when he seemed most absorbed in the past. In that respect he differed from all the other romantic poets, and in his most visionary poetry he tells us constantly what he valued in reality, what is best worth doing and being in life. All that he wrote, in verse or prose romance, is a tale of his own great adventure through a world that he wished to change; and we cannot yet tell how great a change he has worked or will work upon it. But we know already that he was one of the greatest men of the nineteenth century and, with Tolstoy, the most lonely and distinct of them all. In this book I have tried to give some description of his greatness rather than to write his life. He is the subject of a volume, not because he was a poet or an artist, but because the minds of men would have been different from what they are if he had never been born. Yet his art and his poetry were a great part of his action; indeed he was artist and poet before he had any conscious intention of changing the world, and the world has listened to his advice because he was an artist and a poet.
He was also, I believe, a greater and far more various poet than most people think. He is commonly known as a spinner of agreeable but shadowy romances, both in verse and in prose. I have therefore written at some length in the effort to show that he was far more than that. There are small men who have a specific gift for literature or art and whose work pleases us because of this gift, in spite of their smallness. But Morris was a great man, great in intelligence, in will, and in passion; and the better one knows his work, the more one sees that greatness in all of it. All those who knew him well recognised it, even if they cared nothing for poetry or art; they fell under his influence as men fell under the influence of Napoleon, and that although they had none of Napoleon’s love of power. This book is written by someone who did not know him, and it is an attempt to show the nature of his influence and of his greatness in his works. He did so many things that it is impossible to speak of them all in a volume of this length; and he was never the centre of a circle like Doctor Johnson or Rossetti. Those who dealt directly with him felt that he made the issues of life and of art clearer to them; and that, we may be sure, he will continue to do for many generations yet unborn.
13. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beatrice Meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast, Denies Him Her Salutation, 1855. Watercolour on paper, 34 × 42 cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
The Early Years, a Promising Future
14. Rose, 1883. Printed cotton. Private collection.
Childhood and Youth
William Morris was born at Walthamstow on March 24, 1834. There was nothing in the circumstances of his childhood to make him unlike other men of his class. His father was partner in a prosperous firm of bill-brokers and the family remained well-to-do after his death in 1847. Morris’s childhood was happy but not remarkable. He gave no special proofs of genius, but showed the same character and tastes as in later years. He liked to wander about Epping Forest and knew the names of birds, learnt whatever he wished to learn easily and remembered it exactly, and was both passionate and good-natured.
One story told of him shows what he wished to learn and how well he remembered it. At the age of eight he saw the Church of Minster in Thanet, and fifty years afterwards, not having seen it since, he was able to describe it in detail. This is one proof, among many, that he understood Gothic art as the child Mozart understood music, seeming to recognise in it a language that he knew by nature. This process of recognition continued all through his youth. It was the chief part of his education; it was what distinguished him from other youths of his time; and it was, as we can see now, a sign of his strong natural character and a preparation for the whole of his future life.
To Morris a Gothic building was not merely something beautiful or romantic or strange. He did not enjoy it only as most of us enjoy a beautiful tune. It had for him that more precise meaning which music had for the young Mozart. He saw not only that it was the kind of art he liked, but also why he liked it. For it expressed to him, more clearly than words, a state of being which he felt to be desirable. It was as if the men who had made it were before him in the flesh and he saw them and loved them. Indeed he had that passionate liking for the whole society in which the great works of Gothic art were produced which some of us have for our favourite poets or musicians. And he missed Gothic art from his present as if it were the voice of some dead loved one. Church after church, as he first saw them in his youth, was remembered as if it were the first meeting with a dear friend; and it was fixed in his mind, not only because he enjoyed its beauty, but because it expressed for him that state of being which he loved in it. It was like a face vividly remembered through affection, and all its details were connected with each other in