Shelburne Essays: William Morris (Part 2)

(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 second 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 2)

The various interests of the world soon invaded that little cénacle, drawing its members into different paths of success; but the mark of those Oxford days and of their comradeship in the long hopes was never worn away. The precise work of each depended on his peculiar talents. For Morris, the future was determined by an aesthetic irritability that was not so much the all-eliminating impulse of the great artist as an indiscriminate hankering after beauty, and by a certain fluidity of temperament. You may sink your plummet into his mind, but you will touch no bottom; there is no solid core; all is movement and flux, save this sense of beauty. which was itself largely a matter of flowing rhythm. The vision of life passed before his eyes in sequence, but without consequence; more than almost any other man of his age he had the romantic indifference to the law of cause and effect which locks events together into a kind of static system, and the bondage of logic he never suffered. The moral compromise of the age, which was like a conventional fiat saying to the movement of life thus far and no farther, and which enfeebled so much of Tennyson’s verse, he never felt. If Tennyson sometimes escaped from that constraint into the higher logic of the spirit, Morris moved for the most part as if unconscious of its existence. There is nothing immoral in his work; but of morality in it we do not think at all, save as another term to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly. 

This lack of a fixed centre is a part of the man’s character, showing itself in his little traits as in his large. There was no repose in his body. He had, says a friend, as Mr. Mackail reports in his life of Morris, the “incessant restlessness of a wild creature.” He was “fond of talking, which he did in a husky shout,” and for emphasis had the “habit of beating his own head.” If anything happened to check his impulse, he would fly into a gusty rage; and there are stories abroad of insane exhibitions of temper, such as striking his head against the wall, rolling in paroxysms on the floor, biting through window-frames, lifting coal-scuttles with his teeth, and the like Herculean feats—half inventions of Rossetti’s humour, it may be, but characteristic of the man. His impatience of hindrance was like the boiling of a mountain torrent over a boulder. Of death he was notoriously afraid, not from any deficiency of physical courage, but in recoil from its final stay and pause. 

The same restlessness runs through his artistic life. I am not sure that I can enumerate all the crafts he took up at one time or another, either in rapid succession or together, but weaving, dyeing, furniture making, paper designing, and printing were among them. So feverish was his method, that his great physical strength was worn out at the age of sixty-two (in 1896; it seems already long ago), and he succumbed to the disease, as his family doctor reported, of “being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men.” Excellent results were obtained in all these arts, even if sometimes, as in much of his printing, the delight in antique forms and the sheer lust of the eye overrode the craftsman’s right feeling for utility. To these tasks of the hand he brought a magnificent scorn of “vagueness, hypocrisy, and cowardice”; and his hatred of these sins against joyous and beautiful production was the real substitute in him for the moralist’s dictates of conscience. One thing is specially noticeable: his successful work was almost purely decorative, depending on fluent line and skilful repetition. He never learned to manage figures, and when animal or bird was necessary to a design, he generally had it drawn in by another hand. A picture, properly speaking, he could never make, chiefly, I believe, because the concentration of sight and the static power of composition were so weak in him. This peculiarity extended even to his taste for the work of others: “his house,” according to Mr. Mackail, “was, with a few exceptions for which there were special reasons, pictureless, and he never bought a picture after the early days when had ceased trying to paint them.” 

Poetry was but one craft among many for Morris, and he turned off his lines with miraculous ease. “That talk of inspiration is sheer nonsense,” he once exclaimed; “I may tell you that flat: there is no such thing: it is a mere matter of craftsmanship. . . . If a chap can’t compose an epic poem while he’s weaving tapestry, he had better shut up, he’ll never do any good at all.” And so he composed epics and lyrics and again epics amidst his other occupations, accomplishing once, it is said, as many as seven hundred lines in a single day. Mr. Noyes, who himself knows something of the poetic pains, stops to calculate this at about one line a minute for twelve hours on end, and is aghast and incredulous at such an enfantement [childbirth]. As a matter of fact, Morris’s writing approaches more nearly than that of perhaps any other Englishman to the style of the improvvisatore; it bears the same relation to the verse of other equally famous poets as the work of the arabesque decorator bears to that of the figure painter. “The poetic upholsterer,” Sir Edmund Beckett called him, and Morris was astonished that this “harmless statement of fact” should have been meant for an insult. 

Well, let us admit all this, and then add that Morris’s verse is superb decoration. With all their shortcomings and their omission of the qualities that mark the great style, it is possible that a time may come when The Earthly Paradise and Sigurd the Volsung will be read more than many a poem that fails in a grander manner. Every one knows the simple and happily conceived plot of Morris’s longest poem. It is told in the prologue how certain gentlemen and mariners of Norway once, in the Middle Ages, set sail to find the Earthly Paradise, and after long wandering came at last to an island in the western sea, where dwelt a Greek people who still preserved the life and traditions of the ancient world. So throughout a year the elders of the two peoples entertain one another with stories of medieval and classical origin, one of each source every month. There is no attempt on the part of the poet to differentiate his style for the two periods; his aim is to waft the reader into “a shadowy isle of bliss” which is neither pagan nor Christian, but the world’s refuge of romance. From Chaucer he drew the plan of his poem, and with Chaucer in his Envoi he ranges himself as pupil with master: 

Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant; 
Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere. 
Though still the less we knew of its intent: 
The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year. 
Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair. 
Hung round about a little room, where play 
Weeping and laughter of man’s empty day. 

The truth is, that, except for their common skill in weaving a story, there are few poets in English from whom Morris differed more than from his avowed model. Chaucer did not hate death as Morris hated it; nor did Morris have any understanding of that broad love of actual life that makes the savour of the Canterbury Tales. His aim was rather to escape from the realities of living, while still shrinking from the contemplation of death or of the eternal things. To me the most pathetic lines he ever wrote are the prologue to the tales of November, wherein he expresses this revulsion from the two realities: 

Look out upon the real world, where the moon, 
Half-way ’twixt root and crown of these high trees, 
Turns the dead midnight into dreamy noon 
Silent and full of wonders, for the breeze 
Died at the sunset, and no images, 
No hopes of day, are left in sky or earth—
Is it not fair, and of most wondrous worth? 

Yea, I have looked and seen November there; 
The changeless seal of change it seemed to be. 
Fair death of things that, living once, were fair; 
Bright sign of loneliness too great for me, 
Strange image of the dread eternity, 
In whose void patience how can these have part, 
These outstretched feverish hands, this restless heart? 

In those lines is something of the grand manner, as it is found rarely, if anywhere else, in Morris—not the weight of Milton, but let us say the elfin gravity of Spenser in the later stanzas of The Faerie Queene. 

[To be continued.]