In the summer of 1857 Rossetti conceived the project of painting the new Debating Hall of the Oxford Union and obtained leave to do so with the help of other artists of his own choosing. There were to be ten paintings in tempera, all of subjects from the Morte d’Arthur; and the ceiling above them was to be decorated. Returning to London he told Burne-Jones and Morris that they were to start on the work at once. Other artists chosen were Arthur Hughes, Spencer-Stanhope, Val Prinsep and John Hungerford Pollen, all young men who would do whatever Rossetti commanded. None of them knew anything about mural painting, and some were only painters because Rossetti had ordered them to paint. The new walls were damp and not prepared in any way to receive colour; but no one had any misgivings. Morris, of course, would much rather paint a wall than a canvas; and he was in Oxford and had begun his picture before the others had made their designs. His subject was “How Sir Palomydes loved la Belle Iseult with exceeding great love out of measure”. He filled the foreground with flowers, and Rossetti, who chaffed him as much as he admired him, suggested that he should fill the foreground of another picture with scarlet runners. Perhaps Morris remembered Blake’s poem, “O Sunflower, weary of time”, with its “youth pined away with desire.” At any rate this was the beginning of the sunflower’s artistic career; and Morris himself, no doubt, was heartily sick of it as an æsthetic symbol twenty-five years later. He was the first to finish as he had been to begin; and at once set to work to paint the roof. In this his old Oxford friends Faulkner and Dixon helped him. For Rossetti believed that any one, when he liked, could paint, and indeed he could communicate talent to his disciples, as a great general can communicate courage to his soldiers. The roof was finished in November; but Rossetti’s painting, Lancelot’s Vision of the Sangrail, was never finished. To judge from the drawing it must have been the finest work he ever did; but it and all the other paintings soon moldered away, and less remains of them now than of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Morris redecorated the roof in 1875.
30. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, The Pilgrim Outside the Garden of Love, c. 1893–1898. Detail from embroidered frieze The Romaunt of the Rose, 155.9 × 306.7 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
31. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., Moon Room panel from the Green Dining Room, 1863. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
The failure of this spirited adventure must have made Morris feel the contrast between the science and organisation of the great ages of art and the ignorance and indiscipline of his own time. All Rossetti’s genius and leadership were wasted upon the walls of the Union because he knew nothing of the craft of wall painting. Morris learnt himself, and taught others, to regard every art as a craft with technical secrets that must be learnt before it could be well practiced. And already he was teaching himself the secrets of craft after craft.
“In all illumination and work of that kind, Rossetti said of him, he is quite unrivalled by anything modern that I know.” Illuminating was never an archaistic fad for him, but an exercise of his talent more natural than picture painting. How natural, we can see from a verse which he wrote long afterwards lamenting how all the arts of the world were unknown to the poor of great towns.
The singers have sung and the builders have built,
The painters have fashioned their tales of delight;
For what and for whom hath the world’s book been gilded,
When all is for these but the blackness of night?
But the painting at the Oxford Union must also have given him a taste of the delights of a great age of art, the heightened powers of companionship, the happy rivalry free from the rancor and cares of competition. There were wonderful evenings after their work, Rossetti still predominating; and among the undergraduates who visited them was the poet Algernon Swinburne of Balliol. Val Prinsep told of his first dinner with Rossetti, where he was introduced to Morris who spoke little. After dinner Rossetti said to Morris, “Top, read us one of your grinds.” Morris refused at first, but Rossetti insisted; and, says Prinsep:
“The effect produced on my mind was so strong that to this day, forty years after, I can still recall the scene. Rossetti on the sofa, with large melancholy eyes fixed on Morris, the poet at the table reading and ever fidgeting with his watch-chain, and Burne-Jones working at a pen-and-ink drawing:
‘Gold on her hair and gold on her feet,
And gold where the hems of her kirtle meet,
And a golden girdle round my sweet,
Ah! Qu’elle est belle La Marguerite,’
still seems to haunt me, and this other stanza:
‘Swerve to the left, son Roger,’ he said,
When you catch his eyes through the helmet slit.
Swerve to the left, then out at his head,
And the Lord God give you joy of it.’
I confess I returned to the Mitre with my brain in a whirl.”
These verses are from two poems, the Eve of Crecy and The Judgment of God, both of which were printed in the volume called the Defence of Guenevere and other Poems, which Morris published early in 1858.
32. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., Elderflowers Room panel from the Green Dining Room, 1863.
Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
33. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., Gourds Room panel from the Green Dining Room, 1863.
Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
The Founding of the Firm
Morris was now about to enter upon the happiest period of his life, a period in which every circumstance, as well as his own gifts and character, conspired to bring him felicity, and in which he achieved fame by doing what he most desired to do. There was no outward reason why this happiness should not have lasted all his life; but, like Tolstoy, he was too great to remain content with it, and, like him he was driven by his own mind beyond happiness to a harder and lonelier task.
Morris, while painting at Oxford, had made the acquaintance of a Miss Jane Burden, whom, because of her great beauty, he and Rossetti wished to paint. She sat for both of them, and Morris fell in love with her and became engaged to her soon after the Defence of Guenevere was published. They were married in Oxford in April 1859; and then Morris began to look for a house that would satisfy him. He wished for a house and everything in it according to his own taste. An old house and old furniture would not content him, because he desired an art of his own time and was eager to produce it himself. He therefore bought a piece of orchard and meadow on Bexley Heath in Kent, above the valley of the Cray; and there Philip Webb, who had just set up as an architect on his own account, built a house for him.
Though the arts do not flourish now, it is difficult to remember or imagine their desperate condition in 1860. At the time, nearly all building was subject to a single principle; and that was as wrong as it could be, for it was the principle of disguise. If a house was built of brick it was covered with stucco so that it might look like stone. Every one, of course, knew stucco from stone;