WILLIAM MORRIS.

I. HIS LIFE, AND HIS SERVICES TO LITERATURE.

By R. J. LLOYD, D.LIT., M.A.

WILLIAM MORRIS was born at Walthamstow, near London, on March 24, 1834. Ten years later his father died, but the family was left in affluent circumstances; for Morris eventually inherited no less than £50,000. He was sent to Marlborough School, and there he remained until he reached his nineteenth year. He then entered at Exeter College, Oxford (June 2nd, 1852); and by a curious coincidence, of life-long importance to both of them, Edward Burne-Jones entered at the same college on the same day. Four years later Morris took his degree, and during the same year (1856) he helped to found and publish the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, a very short-lived venture, but now a precious repertory of notable beginnings by several famous men. But it was fully seven years before he finally found his vocation. He had come to the university with the intention of taking orders, but in the meantime his interest in dogmatic religion had disappeared, and he had become fascinated by fine art. He therefore articled himself to a well-known architect of Oxford, Mr. Street. Only nine months later, however, we find him following Burne-Jones to London, with the idea of becoming a painter. But his talent was neither for architecture, nor for painting, but for the midway art of decorative design. In 1863 he joined with Burne-Jones, Madox-Brown and D. G. Rossetti in founding the firm eventually styled Morris & Co., whose designs in wall

paper, tapestry, tiling, carpets, stained glass and all other internal decoration, are now of world-wide fame.

He had been plunged for four years in the initial labours of this undertaking before he came prominently forward in literature. He had already, in 1858, published a small volume, entitled The Defence of Guenevere, and other Poems, which was known and valued by poets and literary men, but its sale had not exceeded 250 copies; and nine years later, when he launched upon the world a poem of several thousand lines, The Life and Death of Jason, his name was practically new to the general reader. But he must have been courting the muse in secret all the time; for the same volume contained the announcement of a still larger work, The Earthly Paradise, which was completed five years later, in about 50,000 lines. It contained twenty-four stories, strung together on one thread, like the Decameron, or The Canterbury Tales. The later tales of this work were largely drawn from the Icelandic Sagas, and they were followed (1876) by a long poem inspired from the same sources, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs. This story coincides partly with that of the Nibelungenlied, though the Icelandic version differs somewhat from the old High-German folksong. Concurrently with these adaptations from the old Icelandic, he translated the Aeneid (1875), and laboured in conjunction with Mr. Magnusson to produce some translations in prose from the Icelandic also. These were The Story of Grettir the Strong (1869), The Story of the Niblungs and Volsungs (1870), and Three Northern Love Stories (1875). He visited Iceland itself in 1871, and again in 1873. From this point a great change came over both the spirit and the form of his activity. For nine years again (1876-1885) he was almost silent, and then he appeared as editor (1885-91) of a Socialist journal

called The Commonweal. His vehicle too, hitherto almost exclusively poetry, became now almost altogether prose. If we subtract from the verse of his last eleven years that which is purely translation-the Odyssey (1887), the Orderre de Chevalerie (1893), and the Beowulf (1895)— there are only two considerable items left. The one is the small volume of 1891, entitled Poems by the Way, and consisting partly of the impassioned Chants for Socialists, which he had published from time to time in The Commonweal. The other is a romance of the SouthGerman border in Roman times, called The House of the Wolfings, written mainly in verse (1889).

But his chief works for eight years past have taken a form which he had left untried since his juvenile essays in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine forty years agothe form of prose romance. The Dream of John Ball (1888), The Roots of the Mountains (1890), The Glittering Plain (1891), News from Nowhere (1891), The Wood beyond the World (1895), Child Christopher (1895), and The Well at the World's End (1896), have already appeared; and two others, called The Sundering Flood and The Water of the Wondrous Isles are left ready for publication. The interval between the fourth and fifth of this list yielded a series of other prose romances translated from old French.

Mr. Morris carried on his business as a designer in London, and at Merton Abbey in Surrey. He long resided in the Red House at Upton, Forest Gate, which was built for him by Mr. Webb, but latterly, for a good many years, his home was the old Manor-house at Kelmscott, up the Thames. Here, about 1890, he established the famous Kelmscott Press, of whose achievements much will be said in a later paper.

Nothing of Morris' literary work now remains to be mentioned except a few lectures on art and socialism,

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such as his Hopes and Fears for Art (1882), and Signs of Change (1888), and the formal confession of his socialistic faith, which he wrote and published in conjunction with Mr. Belfort Bax, in 1893, under the title of Socialism its Growth and Outcome. Early in 1896 his health broke down, and on October 3rd he died, aged sixty-two. His body was conveyed to Kelmscott in a square coffin of plain oak, and was borne to the grave under a rich cloth of his own designing. He was buried in the churchyard at Kelmscott, in a tomb close by the roadside. But it is sad to note that, deep as is the debt of English culture to William Morris, its representatives were on that occasion conspicuous by an almost total absence. In personal appearance Morris was a man of middle height and broad frame, with clear blue eyes and a mass of curling hair, originally bright reddish brown, but latterly mixed with grey. His face in repose was shrewd, grave, and determined, but became animated and genial in discourse, though he was not a fluent speaker. In his latter years he affected a costume of serge jacket and flannel shirt, but his presence was commanding even then. Of his domestic life I know nothing; but the Earthly Paradise, published in his thirty-fourth year, was dedicated to his wife.

If Morris's poems had come down to us from an obscure antiquity, the internal critic would have affirmed with an absolute certainty that there were at least three Morrises-a Proto-Morris, who wrote the poems of 1858; a Deutero-Morris, who wrote the narrative poems of 1867-76; and a Trito-Morris, who wrote the Chants for Socialists, in 1886-91. Not only are these three divisions of his work very sharply divided in time, but still more sharply in form and feeling. Even to us, his contemporaries, the transitions are startling, because the inter

mediate steps are still obscure. We only know enough to see and say that their succession was not accidental.

The first Morris was a young Oxford man of two or three and twenty, who had fed himself eagerly at school upon romantic literature, and whose imagination had since then been fired by all the splendours of ancient chivalry. By the aid of Froissart and Sir Thomas Malory, and of all the legendary lore of Arthur's knights and Charles's paladins, he had read himself into the spirit of the early fourteenth century, so that he dwelt ever in spirit amid knights and ladies, ordeals and tourneys, dragons and enchanters, clanking mail and shivering spears. He had also fallen under the influence of D. G. Rossetti, a man six years his senior, who was as strongly and more widely in love with mediæval lore than himself All Oxford was then seething with mediæval revivals, but the movement touched Morris on the literary and the artistic side only, not at all on the spiritual. His intimacy with the elder poet was great, but we look in vain for any trace of the mystic inspiration which produced The Blessed Damozel. It is the weakness, too, of revivalists to revive indiscriminately, not only that which is worth reviving, but everything else which happened to belong to it in its former state of existence. Morris has never been a dexterous or patient versifier. He had neither Swinburne's exuberant power of inventing new measures, nor Rossetti's wondrous mastery over the most intractable ancient forms. Yet under Rossetti's influence he essayed some very difficult metrical tasks, which are only saved from failure by the vigour of the composition. Two of the boldest of these efforts are the heroic ballads called "Riding Together" and "Two Red Roses across the Moon." But in both of these the singer dances in voluntary chains, which his art does not suffice to twirl quite lightly. The latter