Born, at Walthamstow, 24 March 1834. At Marlborough Coll., Feb. 1848 to Dec. 1851. Matric. Exeter Coll., Oxford, 2 June 1852; B.A., 1856; M.A., 1875; Hon. Fellow, 1882. Founded “Oxford and Cambridge Mag.,” 1856. For some time after leaving Oxford studied painting and architecture. Married Jane Burden, 26 April 1859. Started manufactory of artistic house decorations and implements, 1863. Lectured on art in Birmingham, London and Nottingham, 1878–81. Contrib. to various periodicals. In later years, active in support of Socialist doctrines. Started Kelmscott Press, 1891. Died, in London, 3 Oct. 1896. Works (exclusive of various broadsides and single sheets printed for distribution): “Sir Galahad,” 1858; “The Defence of Guenevere,” 1858; “The Life and Death of Jason,” 1867; “The Earthly Paradise” (3 vols.), 1868 [1868–70]; “Love is Enough,” 1873 [1872]; “The Two Sides of The River, etc.” (priv. ptd.), 1876; “The Story of Sigurd the Volsung,” 1877 [1876]; “The Decorative Arts” [1878]; “Hopes and Fears for Art,” 1882; “Art and Socialism,” 1884; “Textile Fabrics,” 1884; “A Summary of the Principles of Socialism” (with H. M. Hyndman), 1884; “For Whom shall we Vote?” (anon.) [1884]; “Chants for Socialists,” 1885; “Useful Work v. Useless Toil,” 1885; “The Manifesto of the Socialist League,” 1885; “A Short Account of the Commune of Paris” (with E. B. Bax), 1886; “The God of the Poor” [1886]; “The Labour Question from the Socialist Standpoint,” 1886; “The Aims of Art,” 1887; “Alfred Linnell,” 1887; “The Tables Turned,” 1887; “A Dream of John Ball,” 1888; “True and False Society,” 1888; “Signs of Change,” 1888; “A Tale of the House of the Wolfings,” 1889; “The Roots of the Mountains,” 1890 [1889]; “Monopoly,” 1890; “News from Nowhere,” 1891 [1890]; “Poems by the Way,” 1891; “The Story of the Glittering Plain,” 1891; “A King’s Lesson,” 1891; “Under an Elm Tree,” 1891; “The Socialist Ideal of Art,” 1891; “Addresses” [at Birmingham Art Gallery], 1891; “The Reward of Labour” [1892]; “Gothic Architecture,” 1893; “Socialism (with E. B. Bax), 1893; “The Wood beyond the World,” 1894; “Letters on Socialism” (priv. ptd.), 1894; “Concerning Westminster Abbey” (anon.), [1894]; “Child Christopher,” 1895, “The Well at the World’s End,” 1896; “The Water of the Wondrous Isles,” 1897. He translated: “Grettis Saga” (with M. E. Magnusson), 1869; “Völsunga Saga” (with M. E. Magnusson), 1870; “Three Northern Love-Stories” (with M. E. Magnusson), 1875; Virgil’s “Æneid,” 1876 [1875]; Homer’s “Odyssey,” 1887; “The Saga Library” (with M. E. Magnusson; 5 vols.), 1891–95; “The Order of Chivalry,” 1892–93; “Of the Friendship of Amis and Amile,” 1894; “The Tale of Beowulf” (with A. J. Wyatt), 1895; “Old French Romances,” 1896; and edited: “Arts and Crafts Essays,” 1893. Collected Works: “Poetical Works,” 1896.

Personal

  You would think him one of the finest little fellows alive—with a touch of the incoherent, but a real man…. Morris means to be an architect, and to that end has set about becoming a painter, at which he is making progress. In all illumination and work of that kind he is quite unrivalled by anything modern that I know—Ruskin says, better than anything ancient.

  In making the personal acquaintance of one whose artistic work is familiar and admirable to us, the main interest must ever be to trace the subtle, elusive connection between the man and his creation. In the case of Mr. Morris, at first sight, nothing can be more contradictory than the “dreamer of dreams born out of his due time,” and the practical business man and eager student of social questions who successfully directs the Surrey factory and the London shop. Little insight is required, however, soon to find beneath this thoroughly healthy exterior the most impersonal and objective English poet of our generation. The conspicuous feature of his conversation and character is the total absence of egoism, and we search in vain through his voluminous writings for that morbid habit of introspection which gives the keynote to nineteenth-century literature.

  Morris’s figure is the most picturesque in prosaic England. A stout, sturdy, stalwart man, with ruddy face, who looks frankly out upon the world with bright blue eyes. His grand, massive head is covered with a shock of gray hair, tumbled about in wild disorder, while upper lip (which is short) and chin are covered with gray mustache and beard. He is always clad in the same fashion when I see him; a black slouch hat, black sack coat, and a most picturesque blue shirt with collar to match. In winter time he envelopes himself in a thick, dark Inverness cape. A lady informed me that the poet had taken her in to dinner at a party in irreproachable evening dress; but I have never seen him in that conventional garb, and have no wish to. Many years ago he sat accidentally upon his silk hat and crushed it; he has never worn one since. His subsequent career may be said to have consisted, metaphorically speaking, in the crushing of silk hats generally, as well as all other symbols of our artificial society. Not even Shelley or Whitman is a more unconventional figure than is Morris. His very aspect is a perpetual challenge to all that is smug and respectable and genteel.

  William Morris came, too—he who divides his time, now, between writing poems that will live, and planning decorations for houses for other people to live in—and with him came his wife, whose beauty he sang and Rossetti painted, till she became part of the literary history of the Victorian epoch. She was “divinely tall,” this “daughter of the gods,” and by many accounted the most “divinely fair” woman of her time. She is a striking figure yet, with her remarkable height and her equally remarkable grace, her deep eyes, her heavy, dark hair, and her full, sensitive red lips.

  A skald, a viking indeed, was William Morris. I have never met any man who gave an impression of more exhaustless vitality. There never was a man who lived a fuller life; he was the very incarnation of ceaseless mental and bodily energy…. In his personality and views, Morris might be spoken of as Shelley translated into a viking. He was like Trelawney in one thing—that his appearance suggested to the stranger the mien and manner of a sea-captain. When people who knew nothing of the poet save as the author of “The Earthly Paradise” had their attention directed to him, they could hardly believe that, in the robust, square-set, ruddy-faced, blue-eyed, pilot-coated, blue-shirted, sea-captain-looking man, they beheld “the idle dreamer of an empty day.”

  Few men seemed to drink so full a measure of life as William Morris, and, indeed, he frankly admitted in his last days that he had enjoyed his life. I have heard him say that he only knew what it was to be alive…. William Morris was a singularly sane and what is called a “level-headed” man. He had the vehemence, on occasion, of a strong nature and powerful physique. He cared greatly for his convictions. Art and life were real to him, and his love of beauty was a passion. His artistic and poetic vision was clear and intense—all the more so, perhaps, for being exclusive on some points. The directness of his nature, as of his speech, might have seemed singularly unmodern to some who prefer to wrap their meaning with many envelopes. He might occasionally have seemed brusque, and even rough; but so does the north wind when it encounters obstacles.

  William Morris deserves high praise for his attempts to put typography back in its proper field. He seems to have been the first of moderns to see that typography was a manly art that could stand on its own legs without crutches lent by sister arts, and that it should be treated and clothed in manly fashion…. About the mechanical merit of his work there can be no difference of opinion. For an amateur in difficult trades, his workmanship is surprising, if not unexampled. A prominent American typefounder, who has closely scrutinized his cuts of type, testifies that he has successfully passed the pitfalls that beset all tyros, and has made types that in lining, fitting, and adjustment show the skill of the expert. A printer of the old school may dislike many of his mannerisms of composition and make-up, but he will cheerfully admit that his types and decorations and initials are in admirable accord; that the evenness of color he maintains on his rough paper is remarkable, and that his registry of black with red is unexceptionable. No one can examine a book made by Morris without the conviction that it shows the hand of a master.

  No man on earth dies before his day; and least of all can the departure be called premature of a man whose life had been so crowded in activity and so rich in achievement. To one judging by the work done in it, his working day was longer and ampler than often falls to the lot of our brief and pitiable human race. But the specific reasons why that life was not protected beyond its sixty-third year are not difficult to assign. On the paternal side of his family there was a marked neurotic and gouty tendency. Himself of powerful physique, deep-chested, sound-lunged, big-hearted, he yet carried in him that family weakness, which was developed under the pressure of an immensely busy life. On a constitution made sensitive by gout, the exposure of the years of the Socialist crusade, when he had perpetually spoken in the open air in all weathers, and in the worse than open air of indoor meetings, and had often neglected or foregone proper food and rest, told with fatal effect. “I have no hesitation,” his family doctor writes to me, “in saying that he died a victim to his enthusiasm for spreading the principles of Socialism.” Yet this was only the special form that, in those years, his unceasing and prodigious activity had taken: and these words may be enlarged or supplemented by those of an eminent member of the same profession: “I consider the case is this: the disease is simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men.”… With all the patience and conciliatoriness of his later years, he remained absolutely unshaken in his loyalty to his old opinions and to his old associates.

  One piece of William Morris furniture has become decidedly popular in America, and that is the “Morris Chair.” The first chair of this pattern was made entirely by the hands of the master. Unlike most chairs and all church pews, it was built by a man who understood anatomy. It was also strong, durable, ornamental, and by a simple device the back could be adjusted so as to fit a man’s every mood. There has been a sad degeneracy among William Morris chairs; still, good ones can be obtained, nearly as excellent as the one in which I rested at Kelmscott House—broad, deep, massive, upholstered with curled hair, and covered with leather that would delight a bookbinder. Such a chair can be used a generation and then passed on to the heirs.

  So died a knight of the beautiful, without fear and without reproach. In the service of beauty he did the work of seven men, or at least kinds of work enough to make so many men distinguished. His career was a most important factor in the mediæval renascence, and knowledge of it is necessary not only to an understanding of English civilization but of the nineteenth century as well.

  The least sympathetic of his audience could hardly see him on the platform and not be impressed by his wonderful personality; he looked the man he was, powerfully built, thickset, stalwart and sturdy, without any swagger, but with the air of a conqueror as he stood up to speak; an open face of fresh complexion, unshaven and rather rugged beard; his hair, grizzled and curly, upstanding like a mane from his broad forehead in a way that gave him the look of a lion; good grey eyes which could twinkle with merriment, light up with enthusiasm, or flash with indignation; a voice that deepened as he spoke; action and speech so sudden, it seemed it must be spontaneous.

  The divorce of brain and hand, wrought by the present social order—ever more passionate grew his sense of the injustice, chaos and misery this was breeding in the industrial world. The nightmare of it invaded his very sleep, distressed and tormented him at his daily work and finally drove him out as a socialist agitator, to harangue radical gatherings, to face mobs, to spend wrangling nights in vain struggles to harmonize the individualistic and anti-social tempers of the socialistic bodies with which he allied himself. He stood on call to go anywhere and address any meeting before which he could say a word in behalf of the sacred cause. He was ready for revolution, ready to see the whole present social or anti-social, order, go down in ruin, that something better might emerge from the wreck. Here alone, to his mind, lay the possibility of the coming of any kingdom of heaven on earth, and for this he was eager to shed his life’s blood. Poetry, architecture, culture, his interest in these he flung to the winds as child’s play till the new order of things should be ushered in. Caste would be abolished and all would be a common band of toilers for common ends. Then first would the real reign of art and beauty begin, and each one’s daily life, through the marriage of brain and hand, become an espousal of joy. And so the Viking of a man, the craftsman prophet of the new dispensation, wore out his last remnants of ebbing strength in the rapt pursuit of this vision.

  The Golden Rule was always in his mind as he built up in his imagination his Paradise on earth. He possessed the optimism of the kind-hearted, the faith in his fellow men that made him sure of their right acting could they only start afresh with a field clear of injury and abuse. He never dreamed in all his dreaming that these would again grow up and destroy the beautiful fabric of his new society, so bright and unspotted in his mind…. His Socialism, from one point of view, was certainly a tremendous failure, but no other side of his life visible to the public at large showed so plainly his moral virtues, his generosity, his sincerity, his power of self-sacrifice, his effort toward self-control.

The Life and Death of Jason, 1867

  It should now be clear, or never, that in this poem a new thing of great price has been cast into the English treasure-house. Nor is the cutting and setting of the jewel unworthy of it; art and instinct have wrought hand in hand to its perfection. Other and various fields await the workman who has here approved himself a master, acceptable into the guild of great poets on a footing of his own to be shared or disputed by no other.

  He has foraged in a treasure-house; he has visited the ancient world, and come back with a massive cup of living Greek wine. His project was no light task, but he has honorably fulfilled it. He has enriched the language with a narrative poem which we are sure that the public will not suffer to fall into the ranks of honored but uncherished works,—objects of vague and sapient reference,—but will continue to read and to enjoy. In spite of its length, the interest of the story never flags, and as a work of art it never ceases to be pure. To the jaded intellects of the present moment, distracted with the strife of creeds and the conflict of theories, it opens a glimpse into a world where they will be called upon neither to choose, to criticise, nor to believe, but simply to feel, to look, and to listen.

  No narrative poem comparable with this in scope of design or in power of execution has been produced in our generation. By this work Mr. Morris wins a secure place among the chief English poets of the age. The production of such a poem is not only proof of a rare individual genius, but the sign of the abiding vigor and freshness of our literature.

  After seven years of silence “The life and Death of Jason” was a surprise, and was welcomed as the sustained performance of a true poet. It is a narrative poem, of epic proportions, all story and action, composed in the rhymed pentameter, strongly and sweetly carried from the first book to the last of seventeen. In this production, as in all the works of Morris,—in some respects the most notable raconteur since the time of his avowed master, Geoffrey Chaucer,—the statement is newly illustrated, that imaginative poets do not invent their own legends, but are wise in taking them from those historic treasuries of fact and fiction, the outlines of which await only a master-hand to invest them with living beauty…. The poem is fresh and stirring, and the style befits the theme, though not free from harshness and careless rhymes.

The Earthly Paradise, 1868–70

  In this important work Morris reaches the height of his success as a relator…. “The Earthly Paradise” has the universe of fiction for a field, and reclothes the choicest and most famous legends of Asia and Europe with the delicate fabric of his verse.

  That huge decorative poem in which slim maidens and green-clad men, and waters wan, and flowering appletrees, and rich palaces are all mingled as on some long ancient tapestry, shaken a little by the wind of death. They are not living and breathing people, these persons of the fables; they are but shadows, beautiful and faint, and their poem is fit reading for sleepy summer afternoons.

  The rich and fluent verse, with its simple, direct, Old World diction; the distinct vision, the romantic charm, the sense of external beauty everywhere, with a touch of wistfulness. The voice was the voice of a poet, but the eye was the eye of an artist and a craftsman.

  Through all the great lengths of these poems, the verse flows sweetly, with many restful modulations. There is no stress of emotion, no harrowing anguish of circumstance, no rugged, harsh outlines of character. All seems remote. The voices come to us softened by distance, the men and women are seen as through a refining medium. The peace and glamour of an ideal world wrap us in their gloomy haze. A gentle sadness runs through all these poems, and is, indeed, characteristic of this writer’s work throughout. The wine of life ran full enough within the veins of the poet himself, but he gives us no sound of human laughter in his verse. The absence, if not the defect, of humour is everywhere apparent. But no less apparent is the absence of any sympathetic recognition of the serious tragedy of nineteenth century life.

  “The Earthly Paradise” is the work of a born teller of stories for the story’s sake; and it is to be enjoyed very simply, with the same child-likeness of interest which went to its making.

  It contains much that is beautiful but nothing original. Of all the Romanticists Morris most lacked spontaneity and initiation.

The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, 1877

  In “The Story of Sigurd,” which remains his masterpiece of sustained power, he goes sheer through civilization, and finds an ampler beauty shadowed under the dusk of the Gods. He gets a larger style, a style more rooted in the earth, more vivid with the impulse of nature; and the beauty of his writing is now a grave beauty, from which all mere prettiness is clean consumed away. And now, at last, he touches the heart; for he sings of the passions of men, of the fierceness of love and hate, of the music of swords in the day of battle. And still, more than ever, he is the poet of beauty; for he has realized that in beauty there is something more elemental than smiling lips, or the soft dropping of tears.

  The one English poet of the 19th century who might have given us a well-rounded Arthurian epic wrote only four short poems based on Arthurian material. William Morris as a young man was attracted by the Arthurian story, and, if Tennyson had not early occupied the field, might have been led to produce a long Arthurian poem. A less consummate master of technique than Tennyson, Morris had nevertheless an ease of movement and a power of conception hardly equalled by the older poet. The “Idyls” are exquisite, but they lack the vigor and the onward sweep of a great epic. We could well spare some of the tales in “The Earthly Paradise” for an Arthurian poem worthy to stand beside “Sigurd the Volsung.”

  Here not only does he fill a large canvas with an art higher and subtler than that shown in “Jason,” or even in “The Earthly Paradise,” but he betrays a profound concern in the destinies of the race, such as we do not exact from the mere story-teller. Love and adventure he had already treated in a manner approaching perfection; and a sympathetic intelligence of all beautiful legends breathes throughout his works; but Sigurd is something more than a lover and a warrior: he is at once heroic and tragic; and he is surrounded by characters heroic and tragic. In his mythic person large spiritual questions are suggested; he is the typical saviour as conceived by the Northern race; and this side of the conception is more emphatic and unmistakable in the modern work than in the Völsunga Saga, which is the basis of this great poem…. Let it be clearly understood that “Sigurd the Volsung” is no mere rythmic and metrical triumph, though in those matters its merits are, as has been said, of a superb kind. In the much higher qualities, which derive from knowledge of life, feeling for natural myth, epic action and tragic intensity combined, this epic in anapæstic couplets which rounds the second period, stands among the foremost poems not only of this century but of our literature.

General

  Morris’s facility at poetising puts one in a rage. He has been writing at all for little more than a year, I believe, and has already poetry enough for a big book.

  I saw Morris’s poetry in manuscript. Surely 19–20ths of them are of the most obscure, watery, mystical, affected stuff possible. The man who brought the manuscript (himself well known as a poet) said that “one of the poems which described a picture of Rossetti was a very fine poem; that the picture was not understandable, and the poem made it no clearer, but that it was a fine poem, nevertheless.”

  Even to the most cheerful minds, a pensive sentiment lingers about the autumnal days, and this is the prevailing sentiment of the works which Mr. Morris has written. True sorrow is sharply bitter; but there is a mood of mind which is sorrowful in form, and yet in substance is hardly so. It is the mood of the man who recognises the tragic conditions and limitations of human life, but who recognises them as inevitable, universal, not to be subdued nor escaped from, but to be accepted and made the best of. This is the key-note of “Jason” and “The Earthly Paradise.”… I have spoken highly of Mr. Morris’s Greek stories; yet it is impossible not to feel that, exquisite though they are, they lie in many respects apart from us; that there is a fancifulness even in their sorrow (sorrow being, as Arthur Hallam once said, the deepest thing in our nature) which prevents them from appealing to our profoundest sympathies. In his Scandinavian, on the other hand, we feel that we are dealing with our own ancestors, and that there is to us a root of reality even in their most grotesque superstitions.

  “Love is Enough,” Mr. Morris’s latest poem, will not rank, we think, among his highest efforts. The adaptation to modern taste of a mediæval “Morality” has been an experiment of which the result does not tempt us to desire a repetition. The dramatic form lacks its raison d’être when there is no action to support, and an abstract personage such as Love is apt to talk too metaphysically to be readily intelligible to a concrete audience. The sing-song monotony of the dactylic measure, and the cloying alliteration of the language combine to produce an effect of weakness which is increased rather than diminished by the prevailing tone of the poem.

  Mr. William Morris is, in his own way, a true poet, and except, perhaps, one or two faults which might be justified as beauties, his work is so nearly perfect in its kind that one is sometimes tempted to ask the idle question, Why is he excellent in this kind only? It is true that men are not as coins, dead metal. They have within themselves a constant power of development; but it is best spent in the constant bettering of their own form of work…. Mr. William Morris may be said to be the painter’s poet. Every book of his includes a gallery of pictures upon classical and mediæval subjects, various in detail but all full of charm.

  Nothing can be more beautiful, tender, and melancholy than some of his sweet, pathetic stories. Mr. Morris has been compared to Chaucer, but he is at the best a Chaucer without strength and without humor. He has such story-teller’s power as one might suppose suited to absorb the evening hours of some lady of mediæval days. She would have loved Mr. Morris’s beautiful tales of love and truth and constancy and separation, tales which, to quote the poet’s own words, “would make her sweet eyes wet, at least sometimes, at least when heaven and earth on some fair eve had grown too fair for mirth.” But the broad strength of Chaucer, the animal spirits, the ringing laughter, the occasional fierceness of emotion, the pain, and the passion are not to be found in Mr. Morris’s exquisite and gentle verse.

  To indicate briefly some points of contrast—how does the spire of hope spring and upbound into the infinite in Chaucer; while, on the other hand, how blank, world-bound, and wearying is the stone façade of hopelessness which rears itself uncompromisingly behind the gayest pictures of William Morris! Chaucer is eager, expectant. To-day is so beautiful, perhaps to-morrow will be more beautiful: life is young, who knows?—he seems to cry, with splendid immeasurable confidence in the reserved powers of nature and of man. But Morris does not hope: there is, there will be, nothing new under the sun. To-morrow? that may not come; if it does, it will be merely to-day revamped; therefore let us amuse ourselves with the daintiest that art and culture can give: this is his essential utterance…. Morris too has his sensuous element, but it is utterly unlike Chaucer’s; it is dilettante, it is amateur sensualism; it is not strong, though sometimes excessive, and it is nervously afraid of that satiety which is at once its chief temptation and its most awful doom.

  William Morris has a sunny slope of Parnassus all to himself.

  In whom Chaucer and Keats seemed to have revived so long as he was contented to remain “the idle singer of an empty day,” but whose recent espousal of the Socialist cause proves at least that this position is not easily tenable in an age like ours.

  Clearness, strength, music, picturesqueness, and easy flow, are the chief characteristics of Morris’ style…. His pictorial power—the power of bringing a person or a scene fully and adequately before one’s eyes by the aid of words alone—is as great as that of Chaucer…. Morris’ stores of language are as rich as Spenser’s; and he has much the same copious and musical flow of poetic words and phrases.

  In which of his many spheres of activity Mr. Morris has exercised the widest influence it would be hard to say; but it is as the sturdy Socialist lecturer who may be seen any Sunday during the summer months haranguing a crowd in one or another of the open spaces of London, that he is dearest to the “Common People” of the great metropolis. But his work is of far more than mere local interest: wherever his earnest zeal for human well-being becomes known, there he is sure to have many ardent admirers…. Morris is too often regarded by the unthinking as a reactionist—one who would turn back the wheels of progress—and yet such a conception can only be founded on a gross misunderstanding of the whole trend of his work.

  Among all the Utopian or ideal pictures of a reformed world, drawn for our contemplation by enthusiasts, this book [“News from Nowhere”] by Mr. William Morris has a singular charm. It cannot, indeed, rank with the great schemes of Plato, More, and Bacon: it has far less perfection of workmanship, less completeness of design, less dignity of tone.

  It is not often that three volumes by well-known poets are issued almost simultaneously, as has lately been the case, when new books by William Morris, Lord Lytton (Owen Meredith), and Sir Edwin Arnold appeared within a few days of each other. Of these three singers there can be no question as to which is the poet par excellence. The high gods gave their royal largesse to William Morris at his birth; and though he may choose to be decorator, printer, or socialist, he cannot resign his divine inheritance—he must be always and above all a poet. What is the spell that from first to last makes one his captive?—how impossible it would be to put it into words! It is something remote from the present world; for when he writes of social problems and the clamorous issues of the time, he ceases for the nonce to be a poet, and we are no longer his thralls. But when he returns to his true métier, he carries us with him, and bears us on to regions east of the sun and west of the moon—to the dreams and the visions of long ago.

  We have in Mr. Morris what we have not had since Chaucer, and what no other nation has had since a time older than Chaucer’s, a real trouvère of the first class—a person of inexhaustible fertility and power in weaving the verse and the prose of romance, and with a purely lyrical gift which even Chaucer did not often show. It is the quality of poetry in him much more than the particular forms or the agreeable volume in which it manifests itself that has always attracted me, and attracts me now as much as ever to this very remarkable writer.

  William Morris is intellectually far more healthy than Rossetti and Swinburne. His deviations from mental equilibrium betray themselves, not through mysticism, but through a want of individuality, and an overweening tendency to imitation. His affectation consists in mediævalism…. Morris persuades himself that he is a wandering minstrel of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and takes much trouble to look at things in such a way, and express them in such language, as would have befitted a real contemporary of Chaucer. Beyond this poetical ventriloquism, so to speak, with which he seeks so to alter the sound of his voice that it may appear to come from far away to our ear, there are not many features of degeneracy in him to notice.

  Despite the marvelous charm of the old stories and the grace of the telling, it is difficult to linger long in the world of Morris the poet. An intense narrowness has invaded his conception of life. One woman forever wanders through his varied climes, and we weary soon of clinging draperies, gray eyes and tender feet. One young hero, superb, but if the truth be told, monotonous, beholds the maiden, loves, loses, wins, or dies. Delight in the deed is feeble in all the poets of art, and the blows that ring through the poems of Morris sound hollow and false. If the motif of action is unused, the range of feeling even is narrowed. Emotion reduces itself to two phases or indeed to one; a solitary natural passion, death-haunted to the end. Of the subtleties of the inner life, he gives no hint. The whole world of experience so intimately known to Rossetti, the world where the soul meets or seeks the Eternal, is closed to him. In the first pre-Raphaelites religious passion was welded in strange and enthralling unison with the passion for earthly beauty. In Morris it has vanished.

  Morris was conspicuous, with many of the best artists contemporary with him, for the success with which he reverted to earlier methods of design; but in his genius for fine craftsmanship he was alone; a unique figure of our time…. Certainly, the mere craft of printing has rarely been practiced with finer results; in material and workmanship, the paper and press-work of his books are equal to the best that have been produced. The decorative beauty and richness of Morris’s work is so generally acknowledged, that these traits of fine craftsmanship are apt to be overlooked and forgotten; yet, perhaps in these very qualities of good workmanship, unique in our time, the peculiar value of Morris’s work will finally be found to consist.

  It is Malory [“The Well at the World’s End”], enriched and chastened by the thought and learning of six centuries, this story of Ralph and his Quest of the Well at the World’s End. It is Malory, with the glow of the dawn of the Twentieth Century warming his tapestries and beaten metal. It is Malory, but instead of the mystic Grail, the search for long life and the beauty of strength…. Save that its spirit is living, the story does not seem to be coherently symbolical. Such analysis as a transient reviewer may give discovers no clue to a coherent construction. Life is too short for many admirable things—for chess, and the unravelling of the “Faerie Queen” and of such riddles as this. Ever and again the tale is certainly shot and enriched with allegory. But as we try to follow these glittering strands, they spread, twist, vanish, one after the other, in the texture of some purely decorative incident…. All the workmanship of the book is stout oaken stuff that must needs endure and preserve the memory of one of the stoutest, cleanest lives that has been lived in these latter days.

  To read “Love is Enough,” or “The Earthly Paradise,” or “The Life and Death of Jason,” is like taking opium. One abandons oneself to it, and is borne on clouds as in a gondola of the air. Never was one so gently carried along, so imperceptibly, and with so luxurious a motion. There is not even enough sharpness of interest, or novelty in the progression, to jar one on the way.

  In his poetry Morris has always shown a delight in physical existence such as Achilles or Hector would have at once appreciated. He drew his inspiration not only from early Greece, but from the wild, free life depicted in the Scandinavian sagas…. “The Story of Sigurd the Volsung” manifests an intense concern for man’s physical and intellectual well-being in this world. “In The Pilgrims of Hope” he embodied his political convictions and social aspirations. His writings in The Commonwealth may be regarded as the gospel of English Socialism…. As poetry the “Chants for Socialists” seem as if they had been written by a different hand from that which wrote “The Earthly Paradise” and “The Defense of Guinevere;” but who can deny the noble humanitarianism that inspires these simple “chants?”

  It is interesting also to notice that while some poets are thus able to recollect their emotion and improve by revision the expression of it, others totally lack this power. A striking instance was William Morris.

  Of all this group, the one most thoroughly steeped in mediævalism—to repeat his own description of himself—was William Morris. He was the English equivalent of Gautier’s homme moyen âge; and it was his endeavour, in letters and art, to pick up and continue the mediæval tradition, interrupted by four hundred years of modern civilization. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not attract him; and as for the eighteenth, it simply did not exist for him. The ugliness of modern life, with its factories and railroads, its unpicturesque poverty and selfish commercialism, was hateful to him as it was to Ruskin—his teacher. He loved to imagine the face of England as it was in the time of Chaucer—his master.

  On the whole, I consider Morris to have been the largest all-round man of the group, not merely on account of the diversity of his faculties, for he had in his composition a measure, greater or less, of most of the gifts which go to make up the intellectual man and artist, but because he had, in addition to those, a largeness and nobility of nature, a magnanimity and generosity, which rarely enter into the character of the artist; and perhaps the reason why his gifts were not more highly developed was that his estimation of them was so modest. His facility in versification led him to diffuseness in his poems, and the modest estimation in which he held his work, when done, was a discouragement to the “limæ labor” so necessary to perfection. He told me that he had written eight hundred lines of one of his tales in one night, but at the same time he regretted that he could not invent a plot, though the exquisite manner in which he carried out the old plots which have been the common property of poets since poetry existed in the form of tales is honor enough.

  Pure beauty may indeed be taken as the note of all the poetry that William Morris has left for the enrichment of our literature. “Full of soft music and familiar olden charm,” to use Mr. Stedman’s felicitous phrase, it has the power to lull the senses into forgetfulness of this modern workaday world, to restore the soul with draughts from the wellsprings of life, to bring back the wonder of childhood, the glory and the dream that we may perhaps have thought to be vanished beyond recall. It is poetry to read in the long summer days when we seek rest from strenuous endeavor; it is poetry for the beguilement of all weariness, and for the refreshment of our faith in the simple virtues and the unsophisticated life; it is poetry that brings a wholesome and healing ministry akin to that of Nature herself; it is poetry that leaves the recollection unsullied by any suggestion of impurity and unhaunted by any spectre of doubt. Like Lethe, it has the gift of oblivion for those who seek the embrace of its waters; but, unlike the dark-flowing stream of the underworld, its surface is rippled by the breezes of earth, its banks are overarched by living foliage, and its waves mirror the glad sunlight.

  He represents not only that rapacious hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that honourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of workmanship, which gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The time has passed when William Morris was conceived to be irrelevant to be described as a designer of wall-papers…. The limitations of William Morris, whatever they were, were not the limitations of common decoration. It is true that all his work, even his literary work, was in some sense decorative, had in some degree the qualities of a splendid wallpaper. His characters, his stories, his religious and political views, had, in the most emphatic sense, length and breadth without thickness.

  I do not think it was accident, so subtle are the threads that lead the soul, that made William Morris, who seems to me the one perfectly happy and fortunate poet of modern times, celebrate the Green Tree and the goddess Habundia, and wells and enchanted waters in so many books…. When William Morris describes a house of any kind, and makes his description poetical, it is always, I think, some house that he would have liked to have lived in, and I remember him saying about the time when he was writing of that great house of the Wolfings, “I decorate modern houses for people, but the house that would please me would be some great room where one talked to one’s friends in one corner and ate in another and slept in another and worked in another.” Indeed all he writes seems to me like the make-believe of a child who is remaking the world, not always in the same way, but always after its own heart; and so unlike all other modern writers he makes his poetry out of unending pictures of a happiness that is often what a child might imagine, and always a happiness that sets mind and body at ease…. His art was not more essentially religious than Rossetti’s art, but it was different, for Rossetti, drunken with natural beauty, saw the supernatural beauty, the impossible beauty, in his frenzy, while he being less intense and more tranquil would show us a beauty that would wither if it did not set us at peace with natural things, and if we did not believe that it existed always a little and would some day exist in its fulness. He may not have been, indeed he was not, among the very greatest of the poets, but he was among the greatest of those who prepare the last reconciliation when the Cross shall blossom with roses.