CHAPTER X
PERIOD OF DYEING: THE ÆNEIDS: SIGURD THE
VOLSUNG
1875-1876
On the 25th of March, 1875, when the dissolution and reconstitution of the firm was just completed, Morris wrote to Mrs. Baldwin from Queen Square:
"It was very kind of you and I thank you very much for remembering me and my birthday: I have been a happy man with my friends, nor do I think, as far as my constant affection and good wishes are concerned, that I have done otherwise than to deserve the good hap. I am in the second half of my life now; which is like to be a busy time with me, I hope till the very end: a time not lacking content too, I fancy: I must needs call myself a happy man on the whole: and I do verily think I have gone over every possible misfortune that may happen to me in my own mind, and concluded that I can bear it if it should come.
"You would like to see my babies: they are such big girls—and so good; and even so handsome. Me! what a boy I feel still to have that responsibility on me, for in spite of my forty-one years I really don't feel a bit older than when Ned and I were living within sound of those tin-pot bells of St. Pancras: wellremembered days when all adventure was ahead! Nay, in some things I have run through a time when I was older—but by no means wiser—than I am now, between those days and these.
"I shall be not very far from you next week: for I am going with Charley Faulkner, my inevitable travelling-fellow, to look at my fatherland. We are going to Shrewsbury, and thence to a college farm of his on the very head waters of Severn and Wye, where we are to have ponies and go over the hills and faraway, only for about a week in all though: 'tis a short journey, but I think I shall love it. I think one sign of my increasing years is an increasing desire for travel, that I may see the wonders of the world before it is all gone from me: but I suppose I shall get less and less of that pleasure for some time to come: for I am very busy both with my bread and cheese work, and also with my pleasure work of books. I am publishing a little set of Icelandic stories very soon: also this summer a translation of the Æneids, which has been my great joy for months of late."
With such equanimity, even with such elation, it was that he entered on a fresh and crowded period of his life. Out of years of much restlessness and great emotional tension he had emerged, as a traveller might issue from some mountain gorge to a shining and fertile table-land lying broad under the sun. The brooding over death which had for years filled so much of his imagination seemed to fall quite away from him; and with it, as part of the same process, fell away the striving after things impossible. Before him now lay a life more equable in impulse and more rich in achievement: sweeter-tempered, and yet more full than ever of the tears of things, of the desire to do good and to contend against evil, and of unquestioning pursuit of duty not without the courage of hope.
His "pleasure work of books" was still to issue in what he himself regarded as his highest achievement in literature, the epic of "Sigurd the Volsung." But during the year or eighteen months in which it was composed, his principal daily occupation, on what he calls the bread and cheese side of his activity, was the study and practice of dyeing and the cognate arts. This was necessary in order to lay a secure foundation for the production of textiles of all kinds: and it was not till he had mastered its processes that he was able to give his invention and his manual dexterity full scope, and produce what he wished, instead of being restricted to what he could make out of the bad or imperfect material supplied to him by the ordinary channels of commerce. From the very beginnings, the work of the firm had been hampered and often crippled by the difficulty of getting material, either raw or manufactured, which came near Morris's standard. "I remember," he said at the opening of the Manchester Art and Industrial Exhibition in 1882, "when I was first setting up house twenty-three years ago, and two or three other friends of mine were in the same plight, what a rummage there used to be for anything tolerable. On the whole I remember that we had to fall back on turkey-red cotton and dark blue serge." There was now indeed a noticeable improvement in some directions. Industrial art was no longer, as it had been in the fifties, absolutely debased. From centres of education at South Kensington and elsewhere there had been a slow and partial diffusion of knowledge, and ugliness or dishonesty, or both, did not now reign uncontrolled over the whole field of decorative production. Adulteration had been checked: but the traditions of the great age of adulteration had become a fixed habit. On every side Morris was confronted by the double barrier of material that would not take good colour, and colour which in its own substance was uniformly bad. The coarse serges used in the early days of the firm as the ground for embroideries could only be had dyed in one of two ways, in bright anilines, or in colours which were quiet but muddy and without character. When it came to a question of carpets and woven hangings the difficulties were even greater. The dyes in use for carpet-work were both crude and fugitive. Those used in modern French silks he found almost as untrustworthy. "To-day we have bad accounts," is a doleful note of his about this time, "of another set of silk curtains of our selling: green this time, dyed at Lyons: as far as dyers are concerned I wish the days of Colbert back again: it was red last time, and Tours." "I am most deeply impressed," he writes at the end of 1875, "with the importance of our having all our dyes the soundest and best that can be, and am prepared to give up all that part of my business which depends on textiles if I fail in getting them so."
All that could be done was to select the best and make the most of such combinations of them as were possible. "Mr Morris showed his usual sagacity," Mr. George Wardle notes, "in adopting this system of colour so long as the production of the colours themselves was beyond his control. His skill as a colourist was shown in combining colours which, separately, were of but very mediocre character. This system of colour, which may be called provisional, marks very distinctly what may be called the first period of the history of the firm, when Mr. Morris had not yet a dye-house. The peacock-blues, rusty reds, and olive-greens of that period were not by any means his ideals, but the best he could get done. As soon as he was able to set up his own dye-house he turned at once to the frank full hues of the permanent dye-stuffs—indigo blue, madder red, weld yellow, etc.—and with these he produced the beautiful Hammersmith carpets and the Merton tapestries and chintzes."
It may be added that, like most great masters of colour, and following in this matter the best traditions of Oriental art, he used but few colours, and gained his effects by skilfully varied juxtaposition and contrast. In November, 1875, he wrote to Mr. Thomas Wardle, at Leek, giving a complete list of the steam-colours which he required for his own designs. They consist of two blues, one blue-green, two greens, two yellows, and one brown. "To these," he goes on, "one might add a black (if such a thing is to be got fast in steam-colours), and a shade or two of rust-yellows or buffs, which would present no difficulty, as they would be such as are ordinarily used. With the above colours I can carry out any design I should care for that did not need the madder colours, and setting indigo apart. As to the indigo, when we once get it, Prussian blues and greens will be things of the past with us."
Curiously enough, those provisional colours with their dull neutral tints were what clung to the minds of buyers and imitators long after Morris had been able to discard them entirely. The so-called peacock-blue, which he gave up at once when he had revived the use of the indigo vat, and the more appropriately named sage-green, which was one of his particular aversions, became obstinately associated with his name through ignorant imitation as much as by careless or malicious detraction. An incident which occurred in the Oxford Street show-room a few years later gives an instance of what he had perpetually to bear from this invincible ignorance, and of how he sometimes found it past bearing. A person of importance called to discuss the carpeting of his new house. The best specimens of the Hammersmith carpets, then produced in a complete range of pure bright colour, were submitted to his inspection. He gave to them a somewhat impatient and wandering attention. "Are these all?" he asked. He was told yes. "But I thought," he went on, "your colours were subdued?" At this Morris, who had been gradually boiling up during the interview, boiled over. "If you want dirt," he broke out, "you can find that in the street." To the street the offended customer turned, and that was the end of his dealings with Morris & Company.
In the beautiful little essay "Of Dyeing as an Art" which Morris contributed to the catalogue of the second exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society in 1889, he gives an account, at once lucid and fascinating, of the processes which he himself had to recover from abuse or disuse through laborious researches and experiments. "The art of dyeing," he says there in summing up the matter, "is a difficult one, needing for its practice a good craftsman, with plenty of experience. Matching a colour by means of it is an agreeable, but somewhat anxious game to play." The theory for this practice he sought out of old books, mainly French of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ancient practice itself being almost extinct. Gerard's "Herbal," the old favourite of his boyhood, supplied useful information about certain disused vegetable dyes. He even went back to Pliny in the search after old methods. "I have sent you a copy of Philemon Holland's Pliny," he writes in August, 1875, to Mr. Thomas Wardle, "a most curious book in itself, and the translation a model of English: altogether one of the most amusing books in the world to my mind." Other old herbals which he acquired, both for their woodcuts and for the information they gave as to dyeing, were those of Matthiolus (Venice, 1590) and Fuchsius (Basle, 1543), the latter of which he notes as the best of all the herbals for refinement of drawing in the illustrations. "I have got a copy of Hellot (Paris, 1750)," he writes in June, 1876, "who is only about wool-dyeing: he is very minute about the management of the vats, and I think might be of some use in that quarter, as he wanted to do with his vats as we do, viz., make all the shades of blue to be used: he has an interesting chapter on kermes, which he praises as the best and fastest of colours. I can't help thinking that there might have been some foundation for the old idea that pastel and woad were faster than indigo: Hellot says that a vat of pastel only is better for the light colours, as it is hard to get them evenly dyed in a healthy indigo vat, and if they are dyed in an old and weak vat they are apt to be dirty." "We have been trying the 'Cuve d'Inde' here after Hellot," he writes a little later, "but cannot make much of it. I was at Kelmscott the other day, and betwixt the fishing, I cut a handful of poplar twigs and boiled them, and dyed a lock of wool a very good yellow: this would be useful if fast, for the wool was unmordanted. The fishing by the way was so-so, no perch but one, but the pike rather good: I got one of 5 lb. on the paternoster." He studied these treatises, "Le Teinturier Parfait" and others, with such ardour and imagination that he felt himself quite at home among the processes as soon as he got the necessary vats and becks set up. His first dyeings were all done with his own hands, with no help beyond that of a boy who had till then been employed as errand-boy to the glass-painters' workshop. "So well had he prepared himself," Mr. George Wardle says, "that I do not think a single dyeing went wrong, nor was any appreciable quantity of yarn wasted." But in the little dye-house at Queen Square nothing could be done beyond what might be called laboratory experiments: to dye on the scale required for the firm's wants meant falling back on regular dyeworks. For these he went to Mr. Thomas Wardle at Leek. He was the brother-in law of Morris's own manager at Queen Square, and was then already becoming known as one of the first practical authorities on dye-stuffs and the art of dyeing, chiefly as applied to silk and cotton. Morris found him full of interest in the revived methods which had long gone out of use, but which Mr. Wardle remembered as going on in his own boyhood, and which some of his older workmen had themselves practised. For about two years from the summer of 1875 Morris paid numerous and often protracted visits to Leek, where he and Wardle actually restored vegetable dyeing to the position of an important industry.
His first visit to Leek was made in July of this year. "I can't get back till this day week," he writes home when he had been there a few days. "I really can't come away without having come here for nothing; not that I haven't got on fairly well, but that I must see something more of results. The copper pots in the dye-houses, full of bright colours where they are dyeing silks, look rather exciting, but, alas! they are mostly aniline: our own establishment is very small, but I daresay will for some time to come turn out more goods by a great deal than we shall sell."
"The yarns dyed," Mr. George Wardle informs me, "were used for the pile carpets, for he began this business about the same time in Queen Square." The first of his carpet-looms was set up in the top story, and a carpet-knotter was got from Glasgow to teach the girls the method of working; she stayed a few weeks, by the end of which time the girls had learned all that she could teach. The first of his silk-looms, of which there will be more to say hereafter, was set up in Ormond Yard, a year or two later. It was not, however, till he was able to arrange a complete set of dye-shops and bleaching-grounds of his own at Merton Abbey that either carpet or silk weaving could be carried on by him except on a small and experimental scale.
What he worked at most assiduously at Leek was the lost art of indigo-dyeing. In itself this is one of the most delicate and uncertain vats in its due preparation and maturing. The experienced indigo-dyer is said to know when the fermentation has reached its proper point by an acute sense of smell, where no more scientific tests are found to answer. If the proper moment is not seized, the vat becomes useless. Even when the three days' preparation of the vat has been brought to a successful issue, the proper dipping of the yarn, so as to take the dye evenly, and not let any part of it touch the air for a moment, is a matter of the most delicate and accurate handling. "The setting of the blue-vat," Morris says in the essay on Dyeing, "is a ticklish job, and requires, I should say, more experience than any dyeing process." The decay of European indigo-dyeing, itself an art of late importation and not practised in Europe till the end of the sixteenth century, and its replacement by the so-called Prussian blue (ferro-cyanide of potassium, dyed on an iron basis) early in this century, and long before the invention of the anilines, was mainly due to the greater ease and certainty of the latter process. This very uncertainty and delicacy gave it to Morris an additional touch of fascination beyond that of the madder or weld vats. About this time his hands were habitually and unwashably blue, and in no condition to do fine work.
"We have come over here," he writes from Lichfield during one of his fortnights at Leek, "to spend Sunday. Such a dull town is Lichfield, in a dull landscape: the church elaborate and complete, but so small as to be even petty: the old houses here seem to have been pulled down gradually by prosperous dulness, there are scarcely any much older than Johnson's time left; I daresay it was a sweet place enough while ago, when the old wood houses were standing. They have had some history even of late too; there is a stone in a house looking up into the Cathedral—close to mark where Lord Brooke fell, shot through the head from the big tower of the church just as he was beginning the siege of it (he was a Parliamentarian) in 1642—what a little time ago!
"I shall be glad enough to get back to the dyehouse at Leek to-morrow. I daresay you will notice how bad my writing is; my hand is so shaky with doing journeyman's work the last few days: delightful work, hard for the body and easy for the mind. For a great heap of skein-wool has come for me and more is coming: and yesterday evening we set our blue-vat the last thing before coming here. I should have liked you to see the charm work on it: we dyed a lock of wool bright blue in it, and left the liquor a clear primrose colour, so all will be ready for dyeing to-morrow in it: though, by the way, if you are a dyer, you must call it her.
"Leek, Monday. I was interrupted there, and had no time for more at Lichfield: we drove from there this morning about eighteen miles to a station on the Dove, not a bad drive, through the last remains of Needwood Forest. I have been dyeing in her all the afternoon, and my hands are a woeful spectacle in consequence: she appears to be all that could be wished, but I must say I should like not to look such a beast, and not to feel as if I wanted pegs to keep my fingers one from the other. I lost my temper in the dye-house for the first time this afternoon: they had been very trying: but I wish I hadn't been such a fool; perhaps they will turn me out to-morrow morning, or put me in the blue-vat."
It was this absorption in dyeing and dye-stuffs which stopped his work as an illuminator. In the earlier months of this year that work had still been going busily on. On the 11th of March he had written to Fairfax Murray at Pisa:
"I inclose a P.O.O. for £5 for further disbursements on vellum: I would send more, but [for] the scraping everything together to pay my partners, who have come to some kind of agreement with me, if they don't cry off before the law business is settled; which drags on confoundedly, and to say the truth bothers me more than I like to confess. As to my illumination work, it don't get on just now, not because I shouldn't like to be at it, but because I am doing something else with Virgil, to wit, doing him into English verse: I have got toward the end of the 7th book and shall finish the whole thing and have it out by the beginning of June I hope: so you imagine I have not been quite idle. I shall keep you a big paper copy both of that and my new volume of Icelandic stories and of the new edition of 'Guenevere.'"
On the 27th of May he wrote again:
"The vellum came all safe to hand: many thanks for it. I noticed that the smaller size seemed very good: but had not much time to attend to it much, as I am very busy all sorts of ways. I have got my partnership business settled at last, and am sole lord and master here now, with never a Jorkins to refer unpleasant words to: however 'tis a great blessing, and has set me working hard to make things go. I have somewhat slacked from the Virgil translation, as I found it not possible to get it out this summer and easy enough to get it out by October: also I have begun one of the pictures for the Virgil: I make but a sorry hand of it at first, but shall go on with it till (at the worst) I am wholly discomfited. Whether I succeed or not in the end 'twill be a long job: so I am asking you if you would do some of them and what it would be worth your while to do them for. I shall be publishing the Icelandic stories in a week or two. After all I have no news for you; I am up to the neck in turning out designs for papers, chintzes, and carpets, and trying to get the manufacturers to do them: I think we are doing some good things in that way."
Of the great folio manuscript of the Æneid which was now in progress, nearly six books were completed before it was laid aside from pressure of other work. Burne-Jones had drawn for it a series of his most exquisite designs. A good deal of the illumination was executed by Murray after his return to England. Morris himself never resumed it, though even some fifteen years later I remember seeing him turn over the sheets and hearing him talk of finishing it. Finally he sold it to Mr. Murray, in whose possession it now is. In beauty of handwriting and splendour of ornament it takes far the first place among all his manuscripts.
The re-issue of the volume of poems of 1858 took place that April. He consented to it with a good deal of reluctance. Crude or unworkmanlike work, in poetry just as much as in any other craft, made him uneasy and even wretched: and he felt the immaturity of the workmanship in that volume more keenly than the severest of his critics. When he consented, at Mr. Ellis's repeated instances, to let the volume be republished, he insisted that it should be reprinted without the least alteration; he would not undertake any fresh responsibility for it by any excisions or amendments. Mr. Forman has noted a curious little fact: that the erratum slip pasted in the original issue had disappeared from the copy from which the new edition was set up, and that consequently the fidelity of the re-issue to the original extends even to the printers' errors which had been actually noted for correction before the book first appeared.
The volume of translations from the Icelandic appeared, under the title of "Three Northern Love Stories," a month or so later. Its contents were those of which he had given the list already quoted when he began to think of preparing them for publication eighteen months before; and it did not involve any further labour now. But at the beginning of November a new book appeared, which represented long-continued work of a high order, and challenged a wider and more informed criticism, his verse translation of the Æneid.
In departing from the sphere in which he was thoroughly at home and had recognized authority, to undertake a work which would be reckoned as one of scholarship in the narrower sense of that term, Morris took, so to speak, his life in his own hand. "A translator of Virgil into English verse," as Lord Bowen observes in the brilliant little introduction to his own version, "finds the road along which he has undertaken to travel strewn with the bleaching bones of unfortunate pilgrims who have preceded him." And on all the surrounding rocks are perched the severest and most highly educated of critics: men who have learned, if not to do original work of any material human value, at least to take a legitimate pride in their own domain and either to resent or to despise the incursions of amateurs in scholarship. Trained scholars are only too apt, in the words of the same fine and large-minded scholar on another occasion, to be "jealously and suspiciously mounting guard over their own educational blessings, as if they were keeping an eye on their luggage at a crowded railway station." Morris himself was not, in the proper sense of the word, a trained scholar. He had only taken a pass degree at Oxford, and had passed practically on the amount of scholarship with which he went up to Exeter. Since then, while his reading in mediaeval Latin had been immense, he had hardly touched the classical authors. Of all the classical authors, Virgil is the one who demands the greatest knowledge from any one who would really understand him; and it cannot be said that Morris brought to this task any adequate equipment.
Yet for his purposes the attempt was not only legitimate but successful. The earlier romanticists had decried the Æneid as an artificial epic (as though there were such things as natural epics); but their attack had recoiled on their own heads. By refusing to acknowledge the supremacy of Virgil in poetry, they had only thrown discredit on the soundness of their own canons and the truth of their own taste. In this translation Morris did not only indicate what Virgil's beauty and value were to a more sane mediævalism. He did more; he vindicated the claim of the romantic school to a joint-ownership with the classicists in the poem which is not only the crowning achievement of classical Latin, but the fountain-head of romanticism in European literature. In the Æneid, as in other works of supreme genius, the reader imputes his own qualities, but this is because Virgil's own genius is compounded of many subtly woven and far-ranging elements. For what in Virgil is most Virgilian we may go in vain to any translation: for some of his qualities, his stateliness, his rolling pomp of language, his intricate modulation, we need not go to this one: yet it sensibly, and often with great felicity, embodies certain other qualities which more fully trained translators have missed: his sweetness, his romantic melancholy, and something at least of his delicate and haunting music.
Morris took all the pains he could, short of writing a preface, which was a thing he scorned to do, to emphasize the fact that he approached Virgil from this romantic or mediæval side. The very title of "The Æneids" which he gave to the volume was a plain notice of the aim and end of his work. Still, it need not cause surprise that this view of the Æneid, though it represents a substantial element, not only of its true original value, but of that which has since accrued to it through the associations of many centuries, was only received with partial approval by an age more familiar, through habit and education, with the other side of Virgil's art.
Mr. Swinburne, writing to Morris on the 9th of November, 1875, a few days after the publication of "The Æneids," begged him to do a Homer, or at least an Odyssey. Just at that moment, however, anything of the kind was far from the poet's mind. On the day that Swinburne's letter was written, he wrote himself to Mrs. Morris from Kelmscott:
"It began to rain again before I got to Lechlade, at first to my infinite disappointment: however, when I got here and had had my lunch, and, as it were, made myself free of the river by an insane attempt to fish, I began to feel very comfortable, and took out my work and looked at it. The floods are already very high, and as it is certainly going to rain for the next 24 hours, I expect to see something curious. I don't think I shall come back before Saturday, as I really hope to do a pile of work here. I am rather short of victuals, as the booby Judd (female) only got me 1 lb. of bacon instead of 3, as I ordered her: however, there will be enough, I daresay, till we can send into Lechlade: there is also one tin of kangaroo meat. My hands are still somewhat stiff with my work on the river—Lord! how cold it was—wind E. or thereabouts. I am obliged to write by candlelight though 'tis only 4 o'clock.
"Best love to my one daughter—wouldn't she have liked to have been out on the flooded river with me, the wind right in one's teeth and the eddies going like a Japanese tea-tray: I must say it was delightful: almost as good as Iceland on a small scale: please the pigs, I will have a sail on the floods to-morrow."
The birthday letter, which he never omitted to send to his mother, has in it this year a mention of another source of relief to him, the resignation of his Directorship of the Devon Great Consols Company.
"Dearest mother," he writes, "I send you my best love and many happy returns of the day: item I send you a flower-pot and saucer from some samples that they have just sent us from India, and which are still curiosities, as I suppose there are not two more in England at present out of the India House Museum. I have just come from the D.G.C. meeting, and, I suppose, ended my business there, except for receiving my £100 which they were once again kind enough to vote us. Stanley will tell you all about the meeting. I am much better than I have been. I went down (or up) to Oxford for two days at Whitsuntide, and I am going there about the middle of June again to take my M.A. degree; which is perhaps rather a fad of mine; but I thought I might indulge it for once."
The Leek dye-vats were busily at work all that winter and into the following spring. On Sunday, the 26th of March, 1876, he wrote from there to Mrs. Burne-Jones:
"My days are crowded with work; not only telling immoveable Lancashire what to do, but even working in sabots and blouse in the dye-house myself—you know I like that. Your kind hope for my poem was vain I am sorry to say: T. Wardle rather insisted on my going out with him, so I yielded, not very loth, as I thought a country walk would not be amiss: so we took train to a station and then walked, first by a gimcrack palace of Pugin's, Alton Towers to wit, then to a village where your friend the novel-writer came from (called Ellaston, I rather think), then to a village church, Norbury, with a strange very rich chancel to it, out of place in that queer way that things are in England, then up the valley of the Dove to Ashbourne, which I think Dr. Johnson had something to do with: a dull walk that last, I scarcely know why, but Ashbourne church very fine and rich; and so home.
"Some time this week I am going to Nottingham to see the hot vat in operation for flock wool-dyeing: when I was a very youngster, my father's mother, then grown doting, used to promise me a journey to Nottingham, her home, if I were a very good boy.
"Meantime I trust I am taking in dyeing at every pore (otherwise than by the skin of my hands, which is certain). I have found out and practised the art of weld-dyeing, the ancientest of yellow dyes, and the fastest. We have set a blue vat for cotton, which I hope will turn out all right to-morrow morning: it is nine feet deep, and holds 1,000 gallons: it would be a week's talk to tell you all the anxieties and possibilities connected with this indigo subject, but you must at least imagine that all this is going on on very nearly the same conditions as those of the shepherd boy that made a watch all by himself."
The fortunes of the indigo vat are continued in a letter written two days later to Mrs. Coronio.
"March 28th.
"My dear Aglaia,
"I am at last able to write to you, and thank you for your letter: I have a huge deal to do in a very limited time, for I am trying to learn all I can about dyeing, even the handiwork of it, which is simple enough, but, like many other simple things, contains matters in it that one would not think of unless one were told. Besides my business of seeing to the cotton-printing, I am working in Mr. Wardle's dye-house in sabots and blouse pretty much all day long: I am dyeing yellows and reds: the yellows are very easy to get, and so are a lot of shades of salmon and flesh-colour and buff and orange; my chief difficulty is in getting a deep blood red, but I hope to succeed before I come away: I have not got the proper indigo vat for wool, but I can dye blues in the cotton vat and get lovely greens with that and the bright yellow that weld gives.
"This morning I assisted at the dyeing of 20 lbs. of silk (for our damask) in the blue vat; it was very exciting, as the thing is quite unused now, and we ran a good chance of spoiling the silk. There were four dyers and Mr. Wardle at work, and myself as dyers' mate: the men were encouraged with beer and to it they went, and pretty it was to see the silk coming green out of the vat and gradually turning blue: we succeeded very well as far as we can tell at present; the oldest of the workmen, an old fellow of seventy, remembers silk being dyed so, long ago. The vat, you must know, is a formidable-looking thing, 9 ft. deep and about 6 ft. square: and is sunk into the earth right up to the top. To-morrow I am going to Nottingham to see wool dyed blue in the woad vat, as it is called; on Friday Mr. Wardle is going to dye 80 lbs. more silk for us, and I am going to dye about 20 lbs. of wool in madder for my deep red. With all this I shall be very glad indeed to be home again, as you may well imagine.
"I am glad you liked my work at the show, though I don't think it was much to make a row about; the silk piece I thought was the best.Mrs. Lewes came from this country-side, by the way: I went through the village where she lived, on Sunday: Ellaston, I think, it was called; a dull village; I seem to see a good few people about like the 'Aunts' in the 'Mill on the Floss.'
"I hope you are well.
"William Morris."
The following words were written also from Leek, during this visit, to a friend who was passing through one of those darknesses in which the whole substance of life seems now and then to crumble away under our hands. They contain, in brief words that are free from either doubt or arrogance, the confession of his own faith: a matter as to which he was reserved of speech, and only revealed himself under the stress of some unusual emotion.
"Wherein you are spiritless, I wish with all my heart that I could help you or amend it, for it is most true that it grieves me; but also, I must confess it, most true that I am living my own life in spite of it, or in spite of anything grievous that may happen in the world. Sometimes I wonder so much at all this, that I wish even that I were once more in some trouble of my own, and think of myself that I am really grown callous: but I am sure that though I have many hopes and pleasures, or at least strong ones, and that though my life is dear to me, so much as I seem to have to do, I would give them away, hopes and pleasures, one by one or all together, and my life at last, for you, for my friendship, for my honour, for the world. If it seems boasting I do not mean it; but rather that I claim, so to say it, not to be separated from those that are heavy-hearted only because I am well in health and full of pleasant work and eager about it, and not oppressed by desires so as not to be able to take interest in it all. I wish I could say something that would serve you, beyond what you know very well, that I love you and long to help you: and indeed I entreat you (however trite the words may be) to think that life is not empty nor made for nothing, and that the parts of it fit one into another in some way; and that the world goes on, beautiful and strange and dreadful and worshipful."
So much as I seem to have to do!—the words were in one form or another habitually on his lips all through his life: yet he never used them complainingly or grudgingly, but rather as one who felt the world perpetual in its interest and variety, and to whom no length of days could be long enough to exhaust either the work that there was for him to do or his own active pleasure in doing it. But to one of his own heroes, whether Greek or Northern, the wish to be once more in some trouble of his own, however lightly uttered, might have seemed a wilful provocation of fate, and only too certain to draw down its own fulfilment. Within the next few months trouble of his own came to him against which he could have made no provision. The form that trouble took was one which can only be briefly touched upon, but which had too profound an effect upon his whole life to be entirely passed over. His elder daughter, now a girl of fifteen, exceptionally bright, clever, and diligent, was already her father's chosen companion, and gave promise of a brilliant future. In the summer of 1876 her health broke completely down. From this distress his mind was never henceforth free. To all who had the privilege of a close knowledge, his tenderness and unceasing thought and care for her were the most touchingly beautiful element in his nature; but his anxiety over her was literally continuous for the remainder of his life.
On the 18th of July he wrote to Mrs. Morris, who was at Deal with the two children:
"I am so glad to hear that things go well so far: though of course I cannot help being anxious. Yes, I got the dear thing's letters, and answered them on Sunday (else I should have written to you), and very pretty letters they were. The news from here is little or none; e.g., that I broke the strings of the Venetian blind in my room last night; that no water came into the cistern on Sunday, and very little yesterday, and so on. Item, I was not the man that threw the medicine bottles at the dog last Saturday, and was fined a shilling for that righteous indignation.
"I can't help thinking that you have not been so hot as we have been these last days; though last night and to-day it has been cooler: so much so, that, calling on Kate yesterday evening, I found her refusing to go out with her mother because the wind was so cold: nay, she durst not go near the window, for she said that the bitter north wind cut her in half. As for me, that the grumbling circle may be complete, I am longing for that tail of the glacier in Thorsmark, or our camp in the wilderness at Eyvindarkofarver under the snow mountains: in fact, though I don't feel unwell (and therefore ought to hold my noise, as you very truly say), I am depressed and languid (say lazy) and don't care for my work, at any rate not the bread and cheese part of it: though for want of finding any amusement in books on Saturday and Sunday I did manage to screw out my tale of verses, to the tune of some 250 I think. By the way the Athenaeum has been very civil to me about that scrap of poem I published in it the other day, though it was not worth publishing either, and sent me ₤20: it seems, such is the world's injustice and stupidity, that it was a success—never mind; I shall pay for it when my new poem comes out. I cannot tell you how pleased I am to hear that you think so well of Jenny: you don't say much about May: I suppose it can't fail to do her good: I think it would be a great pity to hurry them away if the place really seems to suit them, and if you can hold out there: I will give you as much of my company as work will let me: to-day week or tomorrow week I hope to come down, and shall stay three days or so at any rate: I am looking forward to it very much. Take care of yourself, my dear, and tell me of anything you want: I think we had better spend that £20 in carriages at Deal?"
In spite of the engrossing occupation of the dyeing work and the unsettlement caused by his daughter's illness, the composition of "Sigurd the Volsung" had been advancing swiftly throughout the year. It was published at the end of November. What reception he anticipated for it may be gathered from the letter just quoted: and, in fact, for one reason or another, it was but languidly received. In his own judgment, it stood apart from the rest of his poetry, less because it showed any higher perfection in craftsmanship than because the subject was the story which he counted the first in the world, and because he was convinced that he had treated this story with a fidelity and a largeness of manner for which he could answer to his own conscience. The Volsunga Saga had for long seemed to him almost too great a story to be re-told, and too perfectly set forth in the noble Icelandic prose of the twelfth century to gain, or not to lose, from fresh handling. "This is the Great Story of the North," he had written six years before, "which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks: to all our race first, and afterwards, when the change of the world has made our race nothing more than a name of what has been, a story too, then should it be to those that come after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been to us." When at last he resolved to attempt the re-telling, he was bound by an almost impossible loyalty to his original. For the purposes of an epic it is almost obvious that the story begins far too early, and has epic unity only from the point at which Sigurd's own conscious life begins. The Icelandic Saga is a chronicle which the genius of its tellers has almost against their will converted into an epic, but which retains much history that the limits of an epic reject. The whole of the life of Sigmund, which fills the first of the four books of the poem, is a separate story, containing a strange and savagely magnificent epic of its own, centring round the three colossal figures of Sigmund and Signy and their son Sinfiotli. No art or skill can make this earlier epic either subordinate to, or coherent with, the epic of the Afterborn; of Sigurd, only born after Sigmund's death, and of those with whose lives an inextricable fate enwound his. It is as though the epic of Troy opened with a recital of the epic of Thebes. Both in the Greek and in the Scandinavian cycle the story that comes earlier in the history is also earlier in its structure; more primitive, more colossal, less fully human. The cannibal savagery of Tydeus, the incest of Œdipus and Jocasta, the living burial of Antigone, rouse a greater horror than anything in the Trojan story, but it is not one based on the same universal human sympathy. And so it is with the story of Sigmund: the wolf-change of the Volsung, the cruel purposeless slaughter of Signy's children, the strangely inhuman life and death of the son of that awful brother and sister, are tragic indeed, but with such tragedy as belongs to the dim and monstrous reign of the older gods. With what skill Morris effects the transition, with what genius he drives the story through into its destined channel, is hardly to the purpose: the fact remains that what he tried to do was wrong, and that no skill can set it wholly right. Indeed when he came to the end of the story he was obliged to confess as much. The Volsunga Saga does not end with the episode of Gudrun casting herself into the sea while the palace of Atli roared up in flame. Here Morris stops. But the Saga-writer goes pitilessly on: and after it has lost Gudrun as well as Brynhild the story relapses into something of its earlier horror and savagery. The death of Swanhild, her head tied in a bag because "when she opened her eyes wide, then the horses durst not trample her," is followed by the dismal ending of Gudrun's sons: nor will the Saga-writer stay his hand till he can set down the destruction of that whole kin, root and stem. To pursue the Saga to its end, in a fifth book, Morris no doubt felt to be impossible. To continue after the main interest is gone would be a grave fault of art. But it is a fault of art scarcely less grave to anticipate that interest, and excite it at the opening of the tale in disparate matter, and, as it were, on a false issue.
Yet the main story, as it is told in the other three books of the poem, is undoubtedly unsurpassed in the world for epic grandeur and tragic tension; and in his version, the most Homeric poem which has been written since Homer, Morris felt that he had given it no inadequate treatment. It is a story at once deeper-searching into human nature and more universal in its view of human life than that of either the Iliad or the Odyssey. To cool reflection it must be plain that the story of the Iliad is in itself one of the second order: one that had to be filled up with episodes of extraneous interest, and is raised to its rank, as, on the whole, the greatest poetical achievement of mankind, only by the prodigious genius of its final author. The story of the Odyssey, as it is summed up in the well-known words of Aristotle—"a certain man being in foreign lands for many years, and watched jealously by Poseidon, and alone, and things at home being likewise in such case that his substance was spent by suitors and plots laid against his son, arrives after a tempestuous voyage, and discovering himself to certain persons, attacks his enemies and destroys them, but is saved himself"—is a Saga of the simplest order without any dramatic motive of great depth or complexity, but told with incomparable skill, and brought into a wider atmosphere by the Phæacian romance and the Arabian tales of miraculous adventure incorporated with the original story. Had the luminous intelligence to which we owe the Iliad and Odyssey been applied to a story in itself so tremendous as that of Sigurd, Brynhild, and Gudrun, it is difficult to imagine to what unsealed heights the epic might have risen. As it is, for want of that Greek intelligence, the story is not fully humanized. Grimhild's witch-drink, for instance, is not, like the cup of Circe, the mere embroidery of a fairy-tale: it is essential to the tragedy, and is a type of that savage or inhuman element which lingered through the literature as well as the life of the North.
To Morris's mind, at any rate, the philosophy or religion that lived under these half-humanized legends was something quite real and vital: and it substantially represented his own guiding belief. In a summarized statement of the northern mythology which he wrote out about this time, he concludes with the following striking sentences:
"It may be that the world shall worsen, that men shall grow afraid to 'change their life,' that the world shall be weary itself, and sicken, and none but fainthearts be left—who knows? So at any rate comes the end at last, and the Evil, bound for a while, is loose, and all nameless merciless horrors that on earth we figure by fire and earthquake and venom and ravin. So comes the great strife; and like the kings and heroes that they have loved, here also must the Gods die, the Gods who made that strifeful imperfect earth, not blindly indeed, yet foredoomed. One by one they extinguish for ever some dread and misery that all this time has brooded over life, and one by one, their work accomplished, they die: till at last the great destruction breaks out over all things, and the old earth and heavens are gone, and then a new heavens and earth. What goes on there? Who shall say, of us who know only of rest and peace by toil and strife? And what shall be our share in it? Well, sometimes we must needs think that we shall live again: yet if that were not, would it not be enough that we helped to make this unnameable glory, and lived not altogether deedless? Think of the joy we have in praising great men, and how we turn their stories over and over, and fashion their lives for our joy: and this also we ourselves may give to the world.
"This seems to me pretty much the religion of the Northmen. I think one would be a happy man if one could hold it, in spite of the wild dreams and dreadful imaginings that hung about it here and there."
In this spirit it was that Morris approached the story of Sigurd. Nor need it be matter of surprise that the strength of the poem no less than its weaknesses, its unity of spirit and motive no less than the complexity of its scheme, made it pass over the heads of a public little accustomed to the strenuous task of embracing and taking in any work of great scope and organic structure. Whether or not it be true, as is often lightly said, that the age for epics is over, the time when "Sigurd" appeared was emphatically an age of the idyl, and unresponsive to the appeal of the larger poetic architecture. Morris himself never concealed his own opinion of the merits of the poem. To a petulant, but not wholly unjustified, criticism which Rossetti made on the dragon-transformation of Fafnir, as an element in the story which was not merely barbarous, but silly, he made a reply which can scarcely be quoted here, but which no one who has heard it is ever likely to forget. But he did not let the tepid welcome which "Sigurd" met with weigh on his spirits. Two months after its publication he writes from Leek, where he was again busy among his dye-vats and ordering three hundredweight of poplar-twigs for experiments in yellow dyeing (the colour they gave did not turn out sufficiently fast to satisfy him):
"My ill temper about the public was only a London mood and is quite passed now: and I think I have even forgotten what I myself have written about that most glorious of stories, and think about it all (and very often) as I did before I began my poem."
"I had been reading the Njala," this letter goes on, "in the original before I came here: it is better even than I remembered; the style most solemn (Dasent now and then uses a word too homely I think, which brings it down a little): all men's children in it, as always in the best of the northern stories, so venerable to each other, and so venerated: and the exceeding good temper of Gunnar amidst his heroism, and the calm of Njal: and I don't know anything more consoling or grander in all literature (to use a beastly French word) than Gunnar's singing in his house under the moon and the drifting clouds: or do you remember the portents at Bergthorsknoll before the burning, and how Skarphedinn takes them? or Skarphedinn's death; or how Flosi pays the penalty for the Burning, never appealing against the due and equal justice, but defending himself and his folk stoutly against it at every step. What a glorious outcome of the worship of Courage these stories are."
His position as a poet was in any case secure among those best qualified to judge; and popularity with any large mass of thoughtless opinion was not a thing he very much cared for. The element of aristocratic fastidiousness in his nature rather shrank from it, and it was not till later, when he became the exponent of an active creed, that he felt any of the discouragement that comes of appealing to averted ears. Sir Francis Doyle was now vacating the Oxford Professorship of Poetry, in which he had succeeded Matthew Arnold. Morris was at once thought of by his friends as (at all events if Mr. Swinburne were excepted) the most eminent of other living Oxford poets; and though his want of orthodoxy alike in politics and in religious belief made it certain that he could not be an unopposed candidate, inquiry seemed to justify them in thinking that he might be asked to stand with fair prospects of success. The offer was one which tempted him greatly. His love for Oxford, in spite of his hatred of the typical Oxonian, was very deep-seated, and the position was one which, without involving any serious labour, was both influential and distinguished. But finally he made up his mind against it.
"I am afraid," he wrote on the 16th of February, 1877, to Mr. Thursfield, who had approached him on the subject on behalf of the members of Convocation who were anxious that he should consent to stand, "you must think I have been a long while answering your letter; I beg you to excuse my apparent neglect on the grounds that I found it hard to make up my mind what was right to do. In the first place I thank you personally very much for moving in the matter, and I must say that nothing hardly would please me so much as such a recognition from my University, apart from considerations of fitness on my side: nor would laziness or the various heavy business on my hands prevent me from coming forward if I thought I could be of any real use: neither would a contested election frighten me, though I don't like such things. It is therefore with the greatest regret that I find I must needs say 'no'; and this simply because I feel that I am not the man to fill the post: I suppose the lectures a Poetry Professor should give ought to be either the result of deep and wide scholarship in the matter, or else pieces of beautiful and ingenious rhetoric, such, for example, as our Slade Professor could give; and in both these things I should fail and do no credit either to the University or myself. It seems to me that the practice of any art rather narrows the artist in regard to the theory of it; and I think I come more than most men under this condemnation, so that though I have read a good deal and have a good memory, my knowledge is so limited and so ill-arranged that I can scarce call myself a man of letters: and moreover I have a peculiar inaptitude for expressing myself except in the one way that my gift lies. Also may I say without offence that I have a lurking doubt as to whether the Chair of Poetry is more than an ornamental one, and whether the Professor of a wholly incommunicable art is not rather in a false position: nevertheless I would like to see a good man filling it, and, if the critics will forgive me, somebody who is not only a critic. I ask your pardon for writing so much about myself, but your kindness has brought it on your head."
Shairp was elected without a contest to the professorship: and the chair was dignified by an occupant of unimpeachable orthodoxy, of a most kindly and courteous nature, and of some merit both as a critic and as a poet.