CHAPTER XIII
MERTON ABBEY
1881
Ever since the days when Red House was to have been made the centre of a little manufacturing community, the idea of transferring the works of the firm to some place out of London had been in Morris's mind; and now not only was his dislike of London greater than ever, but the increasing scale and complexity of the business made migration more practically urgent. Weaving, dyeing and cotton printing, the three new staples of the firm's work, are all industries that require spacious workshops; for dyeing and its subsidiary processes of bleaching, the necessary air and water could only be had out of London for anything beyond mere experimental work. But in nearly every branch of the business there were difficulties involved by want of proper premises. At every hand something essential to the production of the finished goods had to be procured or executed elsewhere: in some cases the raw material could only be laboriously obtained from Yorkshire manufacturers; in others the designs made at Queen Square had to be sent out to manufacturers for execution. In neither case was it possible to secure the same results as when the whole work was carried out by men trained in Morris's own methods, and working under his own eye. The least that was wanted was a single place in which the business could be so far concentrated that he could dye his own silks and cottons and wools, weave his own carpets and tapestries and brocades, print his own chintzes, and put together his own painted windows. When the separate counting house and show-rooms in Oxford Street were set up, there was no insuperable difficulty in the way of transferring the manufacturing part of the business from Queen Square and Hammersmith to any centre that might be fixed upon.
To transfer the works to the neighbourhood of Kelmscott was an obvious and tempting solution, if the place had not been so remote and so far from a railway. But not many miles off lay that Cotswold country which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been one of the principal manufacturing centres of England, and whose prosperity had only given way towards the end of last century before northern water-power and the energy of Yorkshire masters. The slopes and valleys of the Cotswolds, where the Thames and its tributary rivers break from the hills, are still thickly set with little towns that were once thriving seats of commerce, and that still retain in their decay the traces of older opulence. So early as the autumn of 1878 the idea of resuscitating the old local industry in one of these beautiful villages was in Morris's mind. He had gone over from Kelmscott to stay for a few days with Price at Broadway Tower. From Broadway he and Price drove over on the 1st of September to the village of Blockley, near Chipping Campden. The village stands high up in one of the lateral valleys, looking down to the plain along which the Roman Fossway runs on its straight course northeastward. A stream runs down the little valley and is gathered in ponds to work several mills, once busily employed in turning out silk yarn for the Coventry manufacturers. One after another they had succumbed to altered conditions and the fierce competition of more modern machinery: and now they stood empty. The notices of the last reduction of wages made, before they had to give up the struggle for life altogether, were still pasted on the workshop doors. Morris fell in love with the place. An ideally beautiful landscape; clean air and water in abundance; a railway station within easy distance; skilled workmen still lingering in the half-deserted village, and owners who would have been glad to make easy terms for what was becoming almost unsaleable property, seemed enough to counterbalance the disadvantage of being nearly a hundred miles from London and more remote still from other manufacturing centres. But to the less enthusiastic mind of his manager the risks of the scheme seemed much too great; and at last Morris reluctantly abandoned it. As time went on, too, the feeling grew on him that, as a Londoner, he ought to be loyal to London and do the best by her.
The neighbourhood of London was searched all round. William De Morgan, who was about to set up pottery works for the manufacture of his lustred tiles and majolica, joined in the search, and it was agreed that both factories should be placed together if possible. At the beginning of 1881 the matter became really pressing. "We shall have to take the chintzes ourselves before long," Morris wrote to his wife on the 23rd of February, "and are now really looking about for premises. Edgar went to look at the print-works at Crayford on Monday. They seemed promising: how queer it would be if we were to set up our work there again. By choice, if 'tis to be had, I had rather get hold of some place on the Colne, say about West Drayton: it would take no longer getting down there, or not so long, as I am to Queen Square now."
On the 3rd of March, "W. De M. is all agog about premises and has just heard of some at Hemel Hempstead near St. Albans. Webb and Wardle are going on Saturday to walk up a stream that runs into Thames at Isleworth."
"I went with De Morgan to Crayford on Monday," he writes to Mrs. Morris again a week later; "the whole country about seems much spoiled since we were there; but Crayford itself less than most places. However, it wouldn't do: though the buildings were big and solid and very cheap: for one thing the time of getting there is unconscionable, over an hour—on the whole it wasn't to be thought of. I saw Hall Place once more and it made the stomach in me turn round with desire of an old house."
The place finally chosen was nearer London than any of these. "On Monday," he writes on the 17th of "March, "De M. and I went to look at premises at Merton in Surrey, whereof more hereafter: they seem as if they would do, and if so, and we can get them, then am I for evermore a bird of this world-without-end-for-everlasting hole of a London." The premises were disused print-works, on the high road from London to Epsom, just seven miles from Charing Cross. They had originally been a silk-weaving factory, started early in last century by some of those Huguenot refugees who had settled in large numbers in the neighbouring districts of Wandsworth and Streatham. The river Wandle, clear and beautiful then, and even now but little spoilt, runs through them, turning a water wheel and supplying water of the special quality required for madder-dyeing. This was one of the prime requisites, and limited the choice of sites materially. "We brought away bottles of water for analysis," Mr. De Morgan says in describing the various searches after the desired factory, "to make sure that it was fit to dye with. I recollect Morris's delight when a certificate was sent from an eminent analyst to the effect that a sample taken from pipes supplying all Lambeth was totally unfit for consumption and could only result in prompt zymotic disease: 'There's your science for you, De Morgan!' said Morris. I explained that if the analyst had known that 250,000 people drank the water daily he would have analyzed it different. This was in Battersea and never came to anything."
The works stood on about seven acres of ground, including a large meadow as well as an orchard and vegetable garden. They were old-fashioned, though still in good repair. The riverside and the mill pond are thickly set with willows and large poplars; behind the dwelling-house a flower garden, then neglected, but soon restored to beauty when it came into Morris's hands, runs down to the water. The workshops, for the most part long wooden two-storied sheds, red-tiled and weather-boarded, are grouped irregularly round the mill lade. Beyond the meadow are the remains of a mediæval wall, the sole remaining fragment of Merton Abbey. Within a stone's throw Nelson had lived with the Hamiltons for the two years which followed the peace of Amiens, until he went out to the Mediterranean as Commander-in-Chief in 1803. But his house had been pulled down many years before. One drawback to the place was its extreme inaccessibility, considering the smallness of the distance, from Morris's house at Hammersmith, or indeed from almost any part of London. The District Railway was not then extended either to Wimbledon or to Turnham Green. To reach Merton from Kelmscott House Morris had to go by the underground railway from Hammersmith to Farringdon Street, cross the City, and then go down to Merton from Ludgate Hill, a journey that took about two hours. He could, however, stay the night at Merton when there was much to be done. A couple of rooms were fitted up for his private use as at Queen Square: "Papa will have a delightful sort of Quilp establishment there," his daughter wrote when the move was being made.
On the 8th of April he notes that he had "pretty much come to the conclusion" with the owners. But there were the usual delays and hagglings: it was desired to have power to build kilns for tiles and glass, so that covenants with regard to chimneys had to be drawn up: and the lease was only signed on the 7th of June. The next day he went down with Webb, De Morgan, and George Wardle, and the alterations began to be arranged. Morris would not pull down any of the picturesque and prettily-weathered workshops; but roofs had to be heightened to give free space for looms, and foundations trenched and puddled to keep out damp (for at Merton water lies four feet below the surface of the ground), besides the heavy work of furnishing, the building of carpet-looms, the digging and lining of pits for indigo vats, and the general adaptation of both buildings and grounds to their new uses. One of the first things he did when the season allowed was to plant poplars round the meadow on which the grounds of the calico prints were to be cleared by exposure to the air. Meanwhile he was designing for chintzes with extraordinary rapidity and success; a whole series of these designs, including many of his very best, were turned out during this summer to be ready for the new works to start upon. The move was made at the beginning of winter. His impatience at the inevitable delays was great. "I am in an agony of muddle," he writes early in November; "I now blame myself severely for not having my way and settling at Blockley; I knew I was right; but cowardice prevailed." The agony, Mr. George Wardle tells me, was merely because everything could not move as easily and quickly as he wished. He "could never imagine difficulties," and chose to think that everything would have gone smoothly at Blockley. But before Christmas everything had been cleared out from Queen Square and its annexes, and the new works were fairly set a-going.
A circular issued from Oxford Street when the Merton workshops were in complete order gives a full catalogue of all the kinds of work designed and executed there. The list is as follows:
- 1. Painted glass windows.
- 2. Arras tapestry woven in the high-warp loom.
- 3. Carpets.
- 4. Embroidery.
- 5. Tiles.
- 6 Furniture.
- 7. General house decorations.
- 8. Printed cotton goods.
- 9. Paper hangings.
- 10. Figured woven stuffs.
- 11. Furniture velvets and cloths.
- 12. Upholstery.
Under some of these headings there are notes of a kind very unlike the usual contents of a manufacturer's catalogue: and the circular may form the text for a brief summary of Morris's methods, and of the personal share he took in the various branches of the work.
In the earlier years of the business Morris had accepted commissions for windows in old as well as new buildings: the most conspicuous instances being the well-known windows in the Latin Chapel at Christ Church, Oxford, and the southern choir-aisle of Salisbury Cathedral. When the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings was founded, he was forced to reconsider the whole question of dealing with old churches more deeply than before; and the conclusions he drew with regard to the practice of restoration obliged him to take up a very stringent attitude when there was any question of alterations to an ancient building. As regards windows in particular, the casuistry of the matter is exceptionally delicate. "We are prepared as heretofore," Morris wrote in this circular, "to give estimates for windows in churches and other buildings, except in the case of such as can be considered monuments of Ancient Art, the glazing of which we cannot conscientiously undertake, as our doing so would seem to sanction the disastrous practice of so-called Restoration." The double ambiguity of the words in which the exception is couched is easily apparent. Even rules laid down with the utmost stringency must in some cases leave room for ambiguities and evasions, and the final decision will fall on the instinct of the artist. But Morris's principles prescribed that in all cases where there was any doubt, an existing building, or any part of an existing building, whether in strict terms a monument of ancient art or not, should be let alone. In most cases there was none. When Dean Stanley asked him to execute a window for Westminster Abbey, and upon his refusal, cited the Vyner window in Christ Church as a precedent, Morris replied that even that window, the excellence of which as a piece of modern work he did not affect to deny, was an intruder where it stood, and alien in character and sentiment from the building in which it was placed.
On the announcement now made and on Morris's own practice under it, Mr Wardle makes some interesting remarks. "Its object was ill understood," he says, "and moreover so little liked, that we found it necessary to repeat orally and with asseverations our firm intention to abide by it, and at the back of this, to get it believed that we had not given up glass-painting altogether. For a year or two certainly our business suffered from the rumour, not wanting in echoes, that Mr. Morris had given up glass-painting; and we had to make many advertisements to the contrary."
"In the minds of most people," Mr. Wardle goes on, and here he touches the real truth of the matter, "who took any interest at all in Mr. Morris's work, the raison d'être of 'Morris glass' was its so-called mediævalism, and it was supposed nothing could be more suitable for an ancient building. The profound misconception which this opinion implied, and the other hopeless mistake which assumed that Mr. Morris's work was purposely 'mediæval,' made it impossible that the circular could be understood.
"The grounds of Mr. Morris's protest were two. The first was the obvious material damage ancient buildings suffer by the process of removing existing glass from the windows and the insertion of new. We had ourselves several frightful experiences, though we used every precaution in our power: how much damage has been done where no such care was taken, and where it was not even suspected that the original tracery and framing of a window was of any peculiar value! It was not uncommon, when a painted window was offered to an old church, that as part of the improvement new tracery and mullions were also decided on. Even when it was intended to preserve the old stonework, it was almost inevitable that some part of it would fall when the support of the ancient glass with its saddle-bars and stanchions was removed: and new stonework would then have to be prepared hastily. Even if all went well, which would be a large concession—for there was always the cutting of the old stonework for the new saddle-bars, the hammering, and the vibration, most dangerous to old masonry—there was the final blotting out of the entire window by the wire guards. These guards are almost equivalent to the abolition of the windows as part of the external architecture, since they hide much of the thickness of the masonry and all the refinements of the mouldings and tracery."
The other ground was that laid down with a firm hand by Morris himself in the original statement of the objects of the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings, and continually impressed and re-impressed by him with tongue and pen whenever he dealt with the subject of ancient art: the essential dishonesty of any process which professed to be "restoration" of the old building; and the essential futility of anything which undertook to replace an original by a copy even when there was not the dishonest purpose of making the copy indistinguishable from the original.
"Never," Mr. Wardle justly adds—and the remark, of course, applies with equal force to the share which Burne-Jones, first as principal and afterwards as sole figure-designer, had in Morris windows—"let people say what they will about the suitability of Mr. Morris's glass to mediæval buildings, do the old and the new rightly harmonize. This last opinion very few were able to adopt, for so few recognized the real originality and modernness of his art. It was supposed to be mediæval. In popular estimation design necessarily takes one of several recognized forms which are called styles, and as his design had many of the characters of mediæval work, he was supposed to be intentionally imitating that style. On the contrary, Mr. Morris was too unaffected, and in the broadest sense natural, in his art to allow himself to imitate, and as he did not intentionally make his work mediæval, he did not pretend that it could be suitable for a mediæval building."
This, then, was Morris's theory, expressed in its rigour. In accordance with it he laid down a self-denying ordinance with regard to supplying painted windows for ancient buildings—self-denying doubly, because not only did this resolution, as has been noted above, injure, and for a time partly cripple, this branch of the business, but because the result in three cases out of four was simply that the owners, or guardians, of the mediæval building went somewhere else; and the window was filled with glass as much inferior to his in colour and design as it was more alien from the spirit of the Middle Ages, not least so when it was inspired by an insincere and pretentious mediævalism.
By abstaining himself, however, he hoped to set an example that others might gradually follow; and perhaps his action has not been wholly without effect. In a few instances he allowed exceptions: among these may be mentioned the five beautiful windows executed by him for the chancel of St. Margaret's, Rottingdean, at the special request of Burne-Jones. In that case the windows were plain lancets filled with modern glass, some of it unpainted, the rest admittedly and unrelievedly hideous. There was no tracery to injure, and no existing ancient glass to suffer from the juxtaposition of the new.
As regards the personal part which Morris took in this branch of the firm's work, it was the invariable practice in early years, and remained the rule after the Merton Abbey works were started, that the interpretation of the design and the choice of the glass came under his own eye. He seldom at any time, and never in more recent years, made complete designs for windows himself. From the first, the figure-subjects were mainly supplied by those of his colleagues who were professional painters. As time went on, they came almost exclusively from the studio of Burne-Jones, who supplied no cartoons for glass except to the firm. But backgrounds and foliage were, as a rule, of Morris's designing, the animals and certain kinds of ornament being often drawn by Webb.
Morris never made his own glass. He often regretted that he did not; but for organizing this manufacture, time and money alike were required beyond what he could spare. There is little doubt that in the colouring of glass, as in that of yarns, his personal touch would have produced greater splendours of tone than could be got by other workers. As it was, his faultless eye for colour had to content itself with doing its best out of the glass supplied by the ordinary manufacturers. If the colour of a Morris window is to the present day unmistakable among all rivals or imitations, this is not from any difference in material, but from the skill in selection and variation which was an instinct in Morris himself, and which to some considerable degree he transmitted to his workmen.
When the cartoons for a window had been drawn, Mr. Wardle notes in speaking of the practice of this period, Morris personally "coloured" the window; that is to say, he dictated in detail to Campfield, the foreman of the painters, what glass was to be used for each part. The various parts were then distributed to the painters, whose work he watched as it went on, though he usually reserved any comments till the painter had done all that he could. Retouches were then made by his direction, and the glass was burned and leaded up. When this was done, there came the final review of the window, a work of great difficulty in any case, and to any ordinary eye impossible in the cramped premises in Queen Square, where some of his largest windows were made. But here his amazing eye and memory for colour enabled him to achieve the impossible: he could pass all the parts of a large window one by one before the light, and never lose sight of the general tone of the colour or of the relation of one part to another. If any part did not satisfy him, new glass was cut and that piece of the window done again.
The painting of tiles, which had been one of the first occupations of the firm in Red Lion Square, had by this time almost ceased. It had ceased wholly as regards figure-painted tiles, of which a few sets of great beauty, some of them with verses by Morris also painted on them, had been made for a few years and not in great numbers. Pattern tiles, chiefly meant for use in fireplaces, went on being produced—as they still are—to a limited extent from the early designs. They were all hand-painted, even when the designs were very simple, the touch of the brush being essential towards giving that quality of pattern and surface that made them coherent with the larger decoration of which they formed a part. The manufacture of tiles on a larger scale and with properly constructed kilns had been taken up by De Morgan as a branch of pottery, and it was not necessary that Morris should continue to make his own. Since the premises in Queen Square were abandoned, the firing of both glass and tiles has been executed elsewhere, no kilns having been built at Merton. The premises which De Morgan took in order to establish potteries close to the Merton Abbey works did not prove suitable to their purpose, and the plan of joint, or even contiguous, factories never fully took effect: but he afterwards set up works in Chelsea from which tiles were supplied well suited to take their place among Morris decorations. It may be added that, while the firm never either designed or made pottery of any kind—the tiles used for painting on being got from outside, chiefly from Holland—they did something towards introducing in England the knowledge of some of the best varieties of foreign manufacture, especially the simple and beautiful Grès de Flandre ware, now so common in the shops of London furnishers, which made its first appearance in England, except as a curiosity, in Morris's show-room. Neither did the production of furniture play any important part in the firm's business. There were generally a few pieces, nearly all from Webb's designs, being made; but Morris never designed any himself: it was only when some piece, such as a chest or cupboard, was to be further adorned with gilding or painting, that it came into his hands. Of all the specific minor improvements in common household objects due to Morris, the rush-bottomed Sussex chair perhaps takes the first place. It was not his own invention, but was copied, with trifling improvements, from an old chair of village manufacture picked up in Sussex by Mr. Warrington Taylor. With or without modification it has been taken up by all the modern furniture manufacturers, and is in almost universal use. But the Morris pattern of the later type (there were two) still excels all others in simplicity and elegance of proportion.
The beginnings of the important industry of carpet-weaving have already been recounted. Looms had already been built at Hammersmith for weaving carpets of considerable size, as much as twelve feet across. The great loom at the Merton works is built for making a carpet of no less than twenty-five feet in breadth. The designing of these carpets was wholly, or almost wholly, done by Morris himself. His practice was first to make a drawing on the scale of about one-eighth of the full size, which he coloured very carefully with his own hand. A draughtsman enlarged this coloured drawing on the "point paper"—paper, that is, divided into minute spaces, each representing a single knot of the carpet. The pointing on this paper, a work of immense laboriousness, was done by Morris himself until he gradually trained other workmen to do it with the accurate judgment which makes all the difference between the right and wrong expression of the design. The same laborious work was undertaken by him in the designing of silk damasks, woven tapestries, and all the patterned woven stuffs produced on his looms.
Beyond the preliminary tasks of designing and pointing, the actual work at the loom performed by Morris remained for some years very great: and it became still greater when he set aside the carpet-loom for the tapestry-loom, upon which he revived the splendid and almost extinct art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In a diary of his daily occupations which he kept in the year of the removal to Merton, the entries of morning work at the tapestry-loom are continual. As early in the year as the 12th of March he puts down "up at 7.30, about four hours tapestry": a week later, "up at 6½, four hours tapestry"; and as the mornings lengthened in April, "up at 6, two hours tapestry," "up at 5.30, three hours tapestry." All through the summer the entries go on: he was seldom up later than six o'clock for several months, and would be at the loom within ten minutes. One day, at the end of May, "wind W.S.W., very fine bright day, cool in evening" (for if Morris kept any diary at all, however scanty, the weather was always the first thing noted in it), the entry is "Up at 5: 3½ hours tapestry. To Grange. To Queen Square: The green for Peacock" (a woven hanging) "all wrong. Did day books and Friday" (the summing up of the week's business and signing cheques) "besides seeing to this took away model of G.H. carpet from K. Meeting St. Mark's Committee. Dined A. Ionides." And this was hardly an exceptional day, so crowded was his life with occupation.
The carpet he was making for Mr. George Howard, for the drawing-room at Naworth Castle, which is mentioned in this extract, was by far the largest that he had then executed. It was nearly a year in hand, and the hours he spent in designing and pointing it make up the equivalent of a substantial day's work for a full month. The result of a piece of work of this size and intricacy remained an unknown quantity till the end. "Your carpet has been finished," he wrote to Mr. Howard on the 3rd of November, "for a week or two: I have been keeping it back to try for a fine day to spread it on our lawn, so that I might see it all at once: at present I have only been able to see it piecemeal. So seen, it looks very well, I think, and seems to be satisfactory as to manufacture. What are your orders about it? as I shall have to send some one down to Naworth to get it into its place: it weighs about a ton I fancy."
The manufacture of Arras tapestry, on which Morris had been experimenting at Hammersmith throughout the year, was only fairly begun after the works were removed to Merton. The first piece made there was a frieze of greenery with birds, which, like the carpet of the previous year, went to Naworth. In reviving this noble art he had nothing in England to guide him, as to the mechanical part of the work, beyond drawings of looms in old books. To see what the mechanism was really like, he had to pay a visit to the Gobelins, where he found the ancient loom still in use, though sunk to the servile task of making copies of oil paintings. The low-warp loom, which had replaced it elsewhere, he at once dismissed as useless for his purpose. In it the task of the weaver is confined to copying the imperfectly seen cartoon stretched under the warp, at which he peers between the threads. The work is almost purely mechanical; the face of the tapestry being below, and the weaving done from the back, the workman has no means of knowing what effect he is producing, and can only trust to a rigid method. The making of tapestry on the high-warp loom approximates in method to the painting of a picture; the artificer produces his form and colour, stitch by stitch, by the exercise of his own intelligence, and sees, in his little swinging mirror, the actual surface forming itself insensibly under his hand, as if it were a picture on the easel.
When months of daily practice had familiarized Morris himself with the processes and difficulties of tapestry-weaving, the next thing was to teach the art to other workmen. The work is of a kind which experience proves to be best done by boys. It involves little muscular effort, and is best carried on by small flexible fingers. In this as in the preliminary work Morris was aided throughout by J.H. Dearle, then a young assistant, who afterwards became manager of the Merton works and a partner in the firm. "Dearle got on so well," Mr. George Wardle tells me, "that very soon we took in two other boys, Sleath and Knight, as his apprentices. When we moved to Merton therefore we had already three 'hands' fairly competent in this art." The tapestry of the Goose-Girl, designed by Mr. Walter Crane, was the first large figure-piece executed there. Dearle did the faces himself, and the rest was mainly carried out by the two boys.
"At Merton" Mr. Wardle adds, "the boys, who were still young, lived in the house. We gave them board and lodging and a certain weekly stipend. It is worth while to note that there was no sort of selection of these boys, or of any others who were brought up by us to one or other branch of Mr. Morris's business. John Smith, who is now the dyer at Merton, was taken into the dye-shop because it was just being set up at the time he was getting too old to remain errand boy. Others were put to the loom because at the time we were starting this we were asked to do something for them. We took Sleath on that ground first of all, and he introduced Knight. The same rule applied to all others, and its working justified Mr. Morris's contention that the universal modern system, which he called that of Devil take the hindmost, is frightfully wasteful of human intelligence. A few years later, when we were able to set up a third tapestry-loom, we found a lad with equal facility, without selection of any kind, the nephew of the housekeeper at Merton. She happened to tell me, at the time we were getting the new loom ready, that her nephew had left school and was looking for something to do."
This system of setting the nearest person to do whatever kind of work wanted doing was really of the essence of Morris's method as a manufacturer from the beginning; and in his hands it produced surprisingly good results. How it would have worked, whether indeed it would have worked at all, with a man of less genius at the head of the work as a directing and propelling force, is of course a different question. But, as Morris always insisted, it would have worked just as well, and with much greater certainty, if instead of the solitary man of genius at the head of the work, there had been a living inherited tradition throughout the workshop. The skilled workman is not as a rule a workman who possesses any remarkable innate skill of hand. He is one rather whose general intelligence has protected him against that excessive division of labour which cramps and sterilizes the modern artificer. If a rational latitude were given to manual work of the individual under proper guidance, it might well be that the average skill of hand and eye, stimulated and not repressed by its daily labour, would of its own self rise to a level which at present is only reached in isolated instances. On this point the evidence given by Morris himself in March, 1882, before the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction, indicates his view with great clearness and precision. "I often have great difficulty," he said, "in dealing with the workmen I employ in London, because of their general ignorance." This general ignorance was just what had to be met by general education, not by specific technical instruction. But drawing, as at the basis of all manual arts whatever, he held to be an essential element in general education which should be worthy of the name. "I think undoubtedly everybody ought to be taught to draw just as much as everybody ought to be taught to read and write."
The principle thus laid down was accepted by the Government eight years later, when by the Code of 1890 drawing was made a compulsory subject in elementary schools for boys. The step thus taken was even then somewhat in advance of public opinion. That children should all be taught to read and write has now so long been the law that it is accepted somewhat as a matter of course, and protests against it are few and faint. But the doctrine that drawing is just as essential a part of any real education is still regarded in many quarters as a foolish, or at best an interesting paradox; and such instruction in drawing as can be given, in an hour and a half during each week, to children who are allowed to leave school at the age of eleven, is still accepted as the measure of the State's duty.
The divorce between the theory and practice of all the manual arts was a matter against which Morris was always emphatic in his protest. He co-operated loyally in the work done in the teaching of design by the Schools of Art directed from South Kensington. Since 1876, when he first acted as an Examiner to the Art Department, he served year after year until the last year of his life. The work was not interesting to him; it is arduous while it lasts, and the looking over large masses of thoroughly mediocre work was a severe trial to his patience. But he stuck to it for the sake of the good that might ultimately come of it; and in the latter years of his life he had the satisfaction of seeing, in London and elsewhere, noticeably at Birmingham, a real school of manual art slowly form itself whose work was directly aimed at practice.
One secret of the excellence of Morris's own designs was that he never designed anything which he did not know how to produce with his own hands. He had mastered the practical arts of dyeing and weaving before he began to produce designs for dyed and woven stuffs to be made in his workshops. "It is a thing to be deprecated," he says in his evidence before the Royal Commission, "that there should be a class of mere artists who furnish designs ready-made to what you may call the technical designers. I think it is desirable that the artist and what is technically called the designer should practically be one." But this is not all. "A designer ought to be able to weave himself. A man employs a designer to draw his patterns. One of two things happens: either the designer has learnt the method of execution in a totally perfunctory manner, and takes no interest in it, but goes only by a certain set of rules, and is therefore cramped and made dull and stupid by going by them: or on the other hand if, as sometimes happens, the manufacturer goes to a more dignified kind of artist, who, knowing nothing of the way in which the thing has to be done, produces a kind of puzzle for the manufacturer, the manufacturer having paid for it takes it away and does what he can with it, chops the design up and adapts it to his purpose as well as he can; the design is spoilt, and when executed looks not better but worse than the ordinary cut and dried trade design."
"Of late years," he stated in the same evidence, "there has arisen in London a great number of half professional designers, people who would be glad to get work in designing. These people are generally very uneducated in the technique of the arts they design for, which is a great drawback."
Between the workman who had no understanding of design and the designer who had no understanding of execution, the case of the manual arts was hopeless indeed. In both cases alike the root of the evil was sheer ignorance; and this ignorance was directly due to want, in one case as much as the other, of proper education; as that again was due to the false division of labour—the disintegration of labour, as it should more properly be called—which forbade artist and workman alike to know what they were at.
Thus stated the case seems simple enough. But the simplest truths are often the last to be applied to practice. The doctrines laid down by Morris before the Commission were then startling and almost revolutionary; even now but little progress has been made in carrying them out, though their abstract truth is generally admitted. There is a school of designers now, for the most part formed under the influence of Morris's teaching, who design with direct knowledge of the manufacturing processes. But the encouragement given by the State to the art of designing still takes the form of prizes for designs in the air. "Not enough attention is given," Morris said in his evidence, "to the turning out of the actual goods themselves. We cannot give prizes for the things turned out, we can only give prizes for the designs. I think it would be a very good thing to give prizes for the goods themselves." The dislocation between the two sides of the craftsman's education is still so great that this step is thought impossible.
This had been his own experience when he first tried to have carpets made from his own designs by the ordinary manufacturers. He began with the simplest kind, the so-called Kidderminster, a carpet of not more than three colours, in which the pattern is produced by the intersection at fixed points of webs interlaced by the passage of the shuttle through a double or triple-tiered warp. In the trial piece of carpet sent, the design was almost unrecognizable. A suspicion at first crossed his mind that he was being played with: and that the manufacturer, who had frankly said on seeing the design that it was too simple and would not do, had determined to justify his opinion by spoiling it in the manufacture. But this was not the case; he had acted in perfect good faith, and when Morris said to him, "But this is not my pattern," could only answer, "This is how your pattern comes out." Finally an interview was arranged with his "designer," the man who set out the pattern on point paper for the weavers. The root of all the trouble was then found out in five minutes: it was merely this, that the designer could not draw. The pattern was redrawn on point paper in Morris's own workshop, and the carpet (which has become an established pattern and is still the most successful of all the woven carpets produced from Morris's designs) was satisfactorily produced forthwith.
Of Morris's personal share in the firm's work in general decoration and the application of the materials produced by him to their specific purpose, some idea may be formed from fragments of his correspondence about this time with Mr. and Mrs. George Howard. Their house in Palace Green had been recently built by Webb, and was being decorated throughout by Morris. The decoration of the dining-room was unusually careful and elaborate, as it was designed as a setting for a series of paintings on panel by Burne-Jones of the story of Cupid and Psyche.
To Mrs. Howard he writes on the 13th of December, 1879:
"Ned Jones and I went to look at the effect of the gold paper against the picture, and found to our grief that it would not do: yesterday I went there to meet him that we might try something else, but the morning was so bad that he could not come out: this morning I find that you suggest leaving the matter till you come up to town: but meanwhile, I, knowing that it would be impossible to get the work done unless we began at once, have set Leach's men at work to forward the job, so that the drawing-room will be finished next week in the way you wished; and the boudoir has been prepared for final painting and hanging, which would now take less than a week to do at any time: Ned and I are going to look at the room again on Sunday, so that I shall be able to report again on Monday, so that if you agreed to our suggestions there would still be time to finish the room before you get back. I hope I have not done wrong in setting Leach to work: if I have, I must plead the usual excuse of fools, that I have acted for the best.
"Dining-room.—I am bound to ask your pardon for having neglected this job; but I did not quite understand what was to be done except the writing (which by the way is a very difficult business): I am now going to set to work to design ornaments for the mouldings round the pictures, the curved braces of ceiling, and the upper part of the panelling. I fear there is little chance of getting any of this done before your return (I mean executed on the wood-work) but I will do my best to get everything in train to start it on the first opportunity: meantime I have thought it best to tell Leach's man to varnish only the lower part of the panelling, doors, shutters, etc., where the ornament will not come."
And again two days later:
"Ned and I duly went to Palace Green yesterday and our joint conclusion was that the best hanging for the walls of the boudoir would be the inclosed madder-printed cotton: it brings out the greys of the picture better than anything else: also I think it would make a pretty room with the wood-work painted a light blue-green colour like a starling's egg; and if you wanted drapery about it, we have beautiful stuffs of shades of red that would brighten all up without fighting with the wall-hangings: if you could like this and would let me know some day this week, I could get all finished against you come home, but if you still have doubts we would leave the room in a forward state for finishing. To complete the business part of my letter I may as well give you the price of the red stuff: two shillings per yard, yard-wide, which would come to less than the gold sunflower would have done."
The decoration of the house was only completed very gradually. Nearly two years later there is another series of letters to Mrs. Howard:
"Thank you for asking me personally about the patterns: I have been to Oxford Street to-day and told Smith to send off all our patterns that would be of any use to you; I have told him to write 'recommended' and 'specially recommended' on certain of them. As to the papers (sunflower and acorn), I will do what I can to soften the colour.
"May I ask what you are going to do about the drawing-room at Palace Green? Ned tells me that you are going to keep the Dies Domini there, and want to hang the room accordingly: we don't like to do anything there till the ceiling is made safe: what do you think of hanging a piece of stuff behind it? I could get the colour better suited to it so, I believe.
"Ned has been doing a great deal to the dining-room pictures and very much improving them: so that the room will be light and pleasant after all, and the pictures very beautiful.
"As to the red dove and rose, for a curtain, it will last as long as need be, since the cloth is really very strong: I can't answer so decidedly as to the colour; but the colours in it when looked at by themselves you will find rather full than not, 'tis the mixture that makes them look delicate: therefore I believe the stuff to be quite safe to use if you fancy it: of course I don't mean to say that any flat-woven stuff can stand sunlight as well as a piled material, and the velvet also is darker, though not so well dyed as the other stuff.
"As to the other version of the dove and rose, if 'tis a smaller sized pattern in green and yellow, you can use it without hesitation; but if it be of the same size as the red, I should scarcely advise it, if the settees are to have heavy wear: you see we made this stuff for curtains and hangings: I have tried a piece of the purple, turquoise, and yellow as a cushion on a chair of my own on which everybody sits: it has worn better than I expected, but still not like stuff made for it would do. As to the red silk for curtains, what I am doing (for St. James's) is a very fine colour; but also you must not forget that I can do pretty well any colour you want, and of sober reds the resources are great. Item, I can do the most ravishing yellows, rather what people call amber: what would you say to dullish pink shot with amber; like some of those chrysanthemums we see just now? I am going to try that after Christmas.
"The gold and red sunflower is on my board at Queen Square and I will do my best to hit the due colour."
Two letters written about the same time to Mr. Howard, about defects in some painted glass previously executed by Morris for Naworth, are interesting alike as showing the difficulties of working in untested material, and the pride he took in the excellence of his own work.
"'Tis all too true about the Naworth windows: we (and I believe all other glass-painters) were beguiled by an untrustworthy colour, having borax in it, some years ago; and the windows painted with this are going all over the country. Of course we have taken warning, and our work will now be all right. We have given instructions to our man to take out the faulty glass, which we will—restore!—at once, and pay for that same ourselves—worse luck!"
"Borax is the name of the culprit: the colourmakers, finding that the glass-painters wanted a colour that would burn well at a lowish temperature, mixed borax with it, to that end; but unluckily glass of borax is soluble in water, and hence the tears wept by our windows—and our purses. We use harder colour now, so that if any window of ours goes now it must be from other causes; bad burning or the like; I don't think as things go that this is like to happen to us.
"I am very glad indeed that you think the east window a success; I was very nervous about it, as the cartoons were so good that I should have been quite upset if I had not done them something like justice."
But perhaps the most important new development that the business took after it was moved to Merton Abbey was the production of printed cotton goods, the celebrated "Morris chintzes," which soon became more widely known and more largely used than his woven stuffs or wall-papers. Their success was so great that deliberate or unconscious imitations of them soon began to be produced by the manufacturers and find a ready market. Their adaptability to many small purposes gave them an advantage over the paper-hangings and tapestries. To hang a room with good hand-printed paper is a matter of serious expense to many people who would like to do it, but who do not very acutely realize the difference between it and a machine-printed paper that can be produced for one-sixth and bought for one-third of the price. But a mere scrap of these bright and beautifully patterned chintzes can be used to light up a room, as a curtain, or the cover of a chair or a cushion, or in twenty other ways; and perhaps the primary use for which these fabrics were meant, that of wall-hangings, is the one to which they have been most seldom applied. Paper-hangings are so much taken for granted as the covering of the walls of rich and poor houses alike, that people rarely pause to consider their many disadvantages. The simpler patterns of his chintzes Morris was able to produce at a price little higher than that of moderately costly wall-papers; their decorative effect in a room is perhaps tenfold that of the papers; and yet his appeal to use them for the purpose for which they were meant fell on the public in vain. People dressed themselves in his wall-hangings, covered books with them, did this or that with them according to their fancy; but hang walls with them they would not.
Between seventy and eighty designs in wall-papers, and nearly forty in chintzes, were invented by Morris and carried out under his eye in the course of his business life. These numbers do not take account of the variant designs where a different scheme of colours is applied to the same pattern. If these be counted separately, the total number of designs from his own hands amounts to four hundred. In all of them the drawing and the choice of colours were alike his own individual work. The cutting of the blocks was done by workmen; but the cutter's tracing was always submitted to Morris for retouching before it was rubbed off on the wood; and he kept till late years a vigilant eye both on his own dye-vats and on the colour-pots of the paper-makers. It may give some idea of the prodigious mass of his work as a designer to add that the sum total of his designs for paper-hangings, chintzes, woven stuffs, silk damasks, stamped velvets, carpets, and tapestries (excluding the hand-made carpets and the Arras tapestries, which were each specially designed, and as a rule not duplicated) which were actually carried out, amounts to little short of six hundred, besides countless designs for embroidery.
"Of the work at Merton," Mr. Wardle says, looking back on it perhaps through something of that enchantment that is lent by distance, "there seems nothing to say except that it was altogether delightful." It went on in the ordered tranquillity of spacious and even beautiful surroundings. There were pure water, light, and air in abundance; and the change from the cramped quarters and grimy atmosphere of Bloomsbury reacted on the master's own temper. "It is noticeable," says Mr. Wardle, "in remembering his nervous temperament, that at Merton, though he disliked the journey by rail intensely, he showed no irritation on arriving. There remained a certain impetus in his manner, as if he would still go at twenty miles an hour and rather expected everything to keep pace with him." It was not in his workshops alone that he seemed to expect this, nor was it in his workshops that the expectation was oftenest disappointed.
But indeed even to the present day, as one turns out of the dusty high road and passes through the manager's little house, the world seems left in a moment behind. The old-fashioned garden is gay with irises and daffodils in spring, with hollyhocks and sunflowers in autumn, and full, summer by summer, of the fragrant flowering shrubs that make a London suburb into a brief June Paradise. It rambles away towards the mill pond with its fringe of tall poplars; the cottons lie bleaching on grass thickly set with buttercups; the low long buildings with the clear rushing little stream running between them, and the wooden outside staircases leading to their upper story, have nothing about them to suggest the modern factory; even upon the great sunk dye-vats the sun flickers through leaves, and trout leap outside the windows of the long cheerful room where the carpet-looms are built. "To Merton Abbey," runs an entry in a visitor's diary on a day at the end of April, 1882, when the new works had settled fairly down to their routine: "white hawthorn was out in the garden: we had tea with Mr. Morris in his room in the house, and left laden with marsh-marigolds, wallflowers, lilac, and hawthorn." Of these flowers, and of others in their seasons, Morris often used to bring back bunches to London with him, and wonder why any one should be laughed at—as in London one then still was—for carrying flowers.
Nor did it prove to be the case that these humanized conditions, these pleasant surroundings of the work carried on at Merton Abbey, were in any way fatal to the success of the business as a matter of ordinary commerce. It was not from any disastrous experience of his own that Morris was led to despair of the existing order of things. In the most striking passage of his evidence before the Technical Instruction Commission he speaks of the prospects of art in a spirit of confidence and even of cheerfulness. "On the whole," he said, in words which must have been at the time quite sincere—for irony was a figure which he never used—"one must suppose that beauty is a marketable quality, and that the better the work is all round both as a work of art and in its technique, the more likely it is to find favour with the public." And the use of technical education was not, to his mind, to train a select caste of skilled designers and workers, but one more broadly and indeed quite universally applicable: "that the public should know something about it, so that you may get a market for excellence."
This market for excellence he conquered himself, partly by the mere force of his genius, and partly by real business ability. He approached matters of business in so peculiar a spirit, that the question whether he was really a good business man or not was often debated, and is still debateable. Some of the qualities which go to make up that character he undoubtedly possessed in a high measure: above all perhaps, a certain indefinable driving power—a quality as rare as it is valuable—which was quite distinct from his own energy or industry, and which hardly ever failed to affect those with whom he came into personal contact. In his immediate subordinates—Mr. George Wardle first, and the Messrs. Smith afterwards—he was fortunate in finding men who caught this energy from him and yet retained with it a full measure of shrewdness and caution. But such good fortune, according to the Greek proverb so often quoted by Aristotle, is in itself nearly akin to skill; and the choice of a good manager is in effect good management.
But for the ordinary processes of competitive commerce, and this as much before as after he adopted any distinctively Socialistic views, his qualities, whether intellectual or emotional, were not such as are calculated to lead to conspicuous success. The truth is that commercial success is an art which must be seriously pursued, and which he, quite apart from any question of morality, was at once too imaginative, too soft-hearted, and too much engrossed by wholly different interests, to pursue seriously. He carried on his business as a manufacturer not because he wished to make money, but because he wished to make the things he manufactured. The art of commerce as it consists in buying material and labour cheaply, and forcing the largest possible sale of the product, was one for which he had little aptitude and less liking. In every manual art which he touched, he was a skilled expert: in the art of money-making he remained to the last an amateur. Throughout he regarded material with the eye of the artist, and labour with the eye of a fellow-labourer. He never grudged or haggled over the price of anything which he thought really excellent of its kind and really desirable for him to have; he would dye with kermes instead of cochineal if he could gain an almost imperceptible richness of tone by doing so; he would condemn piece after piece of his manufacture that did not satisfy his own severe judgment. And in his relations to his workmen he had adopted the principle of the living wage, and even of profit-sharing, before he began to study such questions from a larger point of view. He could hardly ever be induced to discharge a workman even for habitual negligence or, in some cases which could be quoted, for actual dishonesty. Of the feelings of his social inferiors—or indeed of his social equals—he was sometimes strangely inconsiderate; but towards their weaknesses he was habitually indulgent.
So far did he carry this interest in producing the best work regardless of expense and this careless confidence in the honesty of his workmen, that without some other responsible business manager Merton Abbey would have wrecked the fortunes of the firm. It was encumbered with old or incompetent workmen paid by time, while the more skilled hands were put on piece-work; and similarly in the office the inferior clerks had fixed salaries for so many hours' work a day and no more, while the upper clerks were to a certain extent profit-sharers in the proceeds of the business. This system of profit-sharing was, even during the later years at Queen Square, in process of extension among the higher grades of the workmen. The result of this mingled generosity and slackness was that in the staple product of printed cottons the Staffordshire manufacturers, with their keen eye to profit and machine-like organization, could supply goods, purporting at least to be the same in quality, forty per cent. cheaper than they were turned out at Merton: and till the works were put under more stringent management, the profits of Oxford Street were almost wholly absorbed by the experiments and the leakage of Merton.
In Morris's lectures on Art, and more especially on those lesser arts of life which, though his eye always remained fixed on the greater arts in their culminating glories of architecture and poetry, he had chosen for his own daily province in practice, the outcome of those instincts which had made him a manufacturer, and of that experience which his work as a manufacturer had given him, is visible in many passages of humour or wisdom. In the lecture entitled "Making the Best of it," it is himself whom he describes with complete accuracy in his description of "a handicraftsman who shall put his own individual intelligence and enthusiasm into the goods he fashions. So far from his labour being 'divided,' which is the technical phrase for his always doing one minute piece of work and never being allowed to think of any other, so far from that, he must know all about the ware he is making and its relation to similar wares; he must have a natural aptitude for his work so strong, that no education can force him away from his special bent. He must be allowed to think of what he is doing, and to vary his work as the circumstances of it vary, and his own moods. He must be for ever stirring to make the piece he is at work at better than the last. He must refuse at anybody's bidding to turn out, I won't say a bad, but even an indifferent piece of work, whatever the public want, or think they want. He must have a voice, and a voice worth listening to, in the whole affair."
Such is the ideal handicraftsman whom he thus drew from his own likeness. For what lay at the root of his belief was that this life, the life which he had himself deliberately chosen, should be, and might be, accessible to all. He recognized no essential difference between an artist and a workman. Until a state of society were realized in which (according to his version of the Platonic paradox) artists should be workmen, and workmen artists, no really sound, and living, and permanent art could exist. And the hire of the workman in any really civilized community should be precisely, neither more nor less, what he claimed as his own due, and what he was satisfied with as his own recompense: "Money enough to keep him from fear of want or degradation for him and his; leisure enough from bread-earning work (even though it be pleasant to him) to give him time to read and think, and connect his own life with the life of the great world; work enough of the kind aforesaid, and praise of it, and encouragement enough to make him feel good friends with his fellows; and lastly (not least, for 'tis verily part of the bargain) his own due share of art, the chief part of which will be a dwelling that does not lack the beauty which Nature would freely allow it, if our own perversity did not turn Nature out of doors."
In this last clause of his definition of the ideal life, not for isolated individuals, nor for a cultured class, but for universal mankind, he returns to his perpetual insistence on the value of architecture, in its widest sense, as the beginning and end of all the arts of life. To him, the man lived in the house almost as the soul lives in the body. The degradation of architecture and of its subservient arts of decoration was at once the cause and the effect of the whole degradation of human life.
But how to begin? His own work as a decorator led him to see that in the furnishing of the house, such as it was, a practical beginning, however slight, might be made by every one. Hence he was led to the formulation of his celebrated rule—a rule that, as he said without boasting, will fit everybody; "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." There is no more brilliant example of a rule that is at once completely universal in its scope, and completely certain in its application.
"To my mind," he says in another lecture, "it is only here and there (out of the kitchen) that you can find in a well-to-do house things that are of any use at all." By this accumulation of useless things not only are beautiful things kept out, but the very sense of beauty is perpetually dulled and ground away. If this pressure were once removed—so at least he thought, and it can hardly be considered an Utopian belief—the natural sense of beauty would slowly begin to recover itself, and at last the house that had in it nothing but what was known to be useful would come to have in it nothing but what was really beautiful; the mistaken or bewildered belief in the beauty of ugly things would disappear, and with the dwindling demand for them they would gradually cease to be produced, and fade away bit by bit out of the world.
Closely connected with this doctrine was his second cardinal axiom: "No work which cannot be done with pleasure in the doing is worth doing." That "natural aptitude for his work so strong that no education can force him away from his special bent" was a quality in him which he could not believe to be unique or even peculiar. "I tried to think what would happen to me," he says in another lecture, that entitled "The Prospects of Architecture in Civilization," "if I were forbidden my ordinary daily work; and I knew that I should die of despair and weariness. It was clear to me that I worked not in the least in the world for the sake of earning leisure by it, but partly driven by the fear of starvation or disgrace, and partly, and even a very great deal, because I love the work itself." As he accounted labour without pleasure inhuman, so he claimed as the labourer's right an amount of spontaneity in his work that was far removed from the actual conditions of common labour. What he could least bear, he used to say, if he were a workman, was the uninterrupted work required of them during working hours, and he was sorry for men who had to do it. While he was working himself it was always noticeable how he would break off every now and then to get up and look out of the window, or walk up and down the room, and yet his actual output would be faster and more continuous than that of any workman who never stirred from his bench or took his hand off his machine. His horror of pleasureless labour made him keenly sympathetic with the working man even in his least lovely phases. "If I were to work ten hours a day at work I despised and hated, I should spend my leisure, I hope in political agitation, but I fear in drinking." Even of the ideal workman described above, the workman who is an artist, he confesses that "the capitalist will be apt to call him a troublesome fellow; and in fact he will be troublesome, mere grit and friction in the wheels of the money-making machine, yes, will stop the machine perhaps." And so for the workman who was troublesome without being an artist, who was grit in the wheels from no high discontent or haunting ideal, but only from the incompetence and vice he had inherited from a degraded ancestry and developed in an inhuman environment, he made the largest allowances and had almost inexhaustible patience.
Thus it was that, before and after the adoption of his final political creed, Morris carried on his work patiently from day to day, and thus it was that he exhorted others by word and example to carry on theirs; "not living like fools and fine gentlemen, and not beaten by the muddle, but like good fellows trying by some dim candle-light to set our workshop ready against to-morrow's daylight." Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing.