Shelburne Essays: William Morris (Part 1)

(Pictured: William Morris.) Having concluded our revised re-presentation of An Apology for Poetry, which inaugurated Tradition Restored in the summer of 2016, we have returned to the essays of Paul Elmer More. Accordingly (after a long hiatus), I am happy to present the first post of More’s essay “William Morris,” one of the chapters in his Shelburne Essays, Seventh Series. P. E. More (1864-1937) was an American journalist, critic, essayist, and Christian apologist. Russell Kirk wrote, “as a critic of ideas, perhaps there has not been his peer in England or America since Coleridge.” Kirk speaks of More’s insight into the “enormous error” of secular humanists. More believed that when religion is replaced by the “mere ‘brotherhood of man,’ fratricide is not far distant.” He wrote that the one effective way of “bringing into play some measure of true justice as distinct from the ruthless law of competition . . is through the restoration in the individual human soul of a sense of responsibility extending beyond the grave.” The alternative is a society “surrendered to the theory of ceaseless flux, with no principle of judgement except the shifting pleasure of the individual.” One may say that at present we are wading through the high tide of that flux. He and his friend Irving Babbitt became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism.

William Morris (Part 1)

Mr. Noyes, himself one of the most serious of the younger English poets, has written a life of William Morris in a tone of almost lyrical commendation (1); affording further evidence that the maker of The Earthly Paradise, as the representative of one of the diverging lines from Tennyson’s early Victorian compromise, has in recent years been receiving more critical attention. When Morris went up to Oxford in 1853, bearing with him the humours of a strange romantic boyhood in Epping Forest, he was already steeped in Tennyson, and it was natural that he should have joined himself to a set of men who were under the same spell, “We all had the feeling,” says Canon Dixon, one of that university group, “that after Tennyson no farther development was possible: that we were at the end of all things in poetry.” As a matter of fact, though Tennyson no doubt exercised a strong influence on these ardent seekers after beauty, their course was to be by no means a continuation of the great Cambridge poet’s. They came up to the university with other ideals and they found there other surroundings. 

Morris, too, like Tennyson, made a friendship at the university, which coloured all the rest of his life. When he took his examination at Oxford, there sat beside him in the Hall of Exeter, a boy from Birmingham, Edward Burne-Jones, the future artist, with whom and three or four others was to be formed the Brotherhood (not to be confused with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) whose eccentric doings are chronicled so entertainingly in Lady Burne-Jones’s memoirs of her husband. Both Morris and Burne-Jones were deeply imbued with the enthusiasm left over from the Oxford Movement, and their first aim was to form a conventual society with some vague notion of preserving and sometime disseminating the religious ideas of the past. Meanwhile, their activity took the usual form of publishing a periodical, the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, of which Burne-Jones reported in a letter to a cousin: 

“Watch carefully all that Morris writes. You will find one of the very purest and most beautiful minds on earth breathing through all he touches. . . . Such is our little Brotherhood. We may do a world of good, for we start from new principles, and those of the strongest kind, and are as full of enthusiasm as the first crusaders, and we may perish in a year as others have done before.” 

Perish in just twelve months the magazine did, and if a neglectful world was bettered thereby it was not immediately, but through the lasting influence of those warm aspirations on the men themselves. And I often think that nothing is more striking, nothing, indeed, more lamentable, than the absence of these little societies from our American universities. How utterly lonely and unhelped is the path of many a college man who cherishes the long hopes of youth. We have so little sense of the power and comfort of these frank conspiracies for fame; we seem to be born with a shame of great ambitions, and tremble lest any one should suppose we nourish a plot to conquer the world. And so we go out into life with no recollection of that first buoyant sympathy to hearten us against life’s subduing indifference. We lack the reserve force and the retiring place of such a memory.Well, that is for America, and perhaps for England of to-day; not for the Oxford of the Brotherhood. But this specifically religious zeal soon waned, if it was not rather factitious from the beginning. Morris might be described as a High Churchman and Neo-Catholic when he entered the university, but his religion even then was more a matter of the senses than of morals and creeds. There is a significant note in one of his earliest poems preserved in a letter to a friend: 

’T was in Church on Palm Sunday, 
Listening what the priest did say 
Of the kiss that did betray, 

That the thought did come to me 
How the olives used to be 
Growing in Gethsemane; 

That the thoughts upon me came 
Of the lantern’s steady flame. 
Of the softly whispered name; 

Of how kiss and words did sound 
While the olives stood around, 
While the robe lay on the ground. 

One can imagine the scorn with which Newman would have regarded this use of the Passion of Christ for aesthetic titillation—he who recoiled with suspicion even from the allurement of natural scenery. And there was little of the earlier zeal then at Oxford to correct or change this tendency. “The place was languid and indifferent,” wrote Burne-Jones; “scarcely anything was left to show that it had passed through such an excited time as ended with the secession of Newman.” In the hollow ritualism that was beginning to crystallise from the Oxford Movement, our band of enthusiasts could find satisfaction neither for conscience nor for imagination, and they gradually turned from this mixture to a pure art of the senses. 

New influences, not of the university, began to take hold upon them. They grew deep in medieval things; Poe’s poems came across the water to open a realm of shadowy dreams; Ruskin’s “religion of beauty” created in them the solemn conscience of art, and through Ruskin’s Edinburgh Lectures they were drawn to the strongest force that operated upon them—Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is not easy to account for the extraordinary domination of Rossetti over almost every one with whom he came into contact. We may call it the mystery of his personality; and this, if analysed, will probably reduce in large part to the effect of invincible self-knowledge, to his sure instinct of knowing what he admired and what he wanted, while others were waiting for the guidance of some external impulse. And so, as he became better known to these Oxford searchers, he grew to be for a time a kind of high priest of artistic taste. “Rossetti,” said one of them, “was the planet round which we revolved; we copied his very way of speaking. All beautiful women were ‘stunners’ with us. Wombats were the most delightful of God’s creatures. Medievalism was our beau idéal, and we sank our own individuality in the strong personality of our adored Gabriel.” Their first serious incursion into art under the new leadership was that hilarious fiasco, when Morris, who had no training as a painter, and others who, if they could draw, knew nothing of frescoing, covered the walls of the Oxford Union with pictures which faded disobligingly into the plaster. But there were great days of talk and wild merriment when these friends, now settled in London, came back to Oxford as knights-errant of the brush. And here, from one of the allied artists, we get a vivid glimpse of Morris—or “Topsy,” as he was dubbed by Burne-Jones for his rebellious hair—in the rôle of poet: 

“When dinner was over, Rossetti, humming to himself as was his wont, rose from the table and proceeded to curl himself up on the sofa. ‘Top,’ he said, ‘read us one of your grinds.’ ‘No, Gabriel,’ answered Morris, ‘you have heard them all.’ ‘Never mind,’ said Rossetti, ‘here’s Prinsep, who has never heard them, and besides, they are devilish good.’ ‘Very well, old chap,’ growled Morris, and having got his book, he began to read in a sing-song chant some of the poems afterwards published in his first volume. All the time, he was jiggling about nervously with his watch chain. I was then a very young man and my experience of life was therefore limited, but 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 head, 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.” 

We have wandered pretty far from Tennyson in this ballad rhythm and in this frank lust of gold and blood. Into that empty Palace of Art which the older poet had abandoned for the highway of popular compromises, these young enthusiasts rushed with no fear and no compunction. It is not without significance that they called their common house in London by this very name which Tennyson chose as the death-place of the spirit—The Palace of Art. 

(1) William Morris. By Alfred Noyes, (English Men of Letters.) New York: The Macmillan Co., 1908.