Leslie Stephen - "Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.)"

Johann Wolfgang Goethe - "Die Mitschuldigen"

P. G. Wodehouse - "The Man With Two Left Feet"

Ruth Comfort Mitchell - "Jane Journeys On"

Editorial
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Victorian Worthies

G >> George Henry Blore >> Victorian Worthies




The most visible sign of it was at the International Medical Congress
held at Amsterdam in 1879 and attended by representatives of the great
European nations. One sitting was devoted to the antiseptic system; and
Lister, after delivering an address, received an ovation so marked that
none of his fellow-countrymen could fail to see the esteem in which he
was held abroad. Even in London many of his rivals had by now been
converted. The most distinguished of them, Sir James Paget, openly
expressed remorse for his reluctance to accept the antiseptic principle
earlier, and compared his own record of failures with the successes
attained by his colleague at St. Bartholomew's Thomas Smith, the one
eminent London surgeon who had given Listerism a thorough trial. Other
triumphs followed, such as the visits in 1889 to Oxford and Cambridge to
receive Honorary Degrees, the offer of a baronetcy in 1883, and the
conferring on him in 1885 of the Prussian 'Ordre pour le merite'.[49]
But a chronicle of such external matters is wearisome in itself; and
before the climax was reached, the current of opinion was, by a strange
turn of fortune, already setting in another direction.

[Note 49: Restricted to thirty German and thirty foreign members.]

This was due to the introduction of the so-called aseptic theory so
widely prevalent to-day, of which the chief prophet in 1885 was
Professor von Bergmann of Berlin. Into the relative merits of systems,
on which the learned disagree, it is absurd for laymen to enter; nor is
it necessary to make such comparisons in order to appreciate the example
of Lister's life. The new school believe that they have gained by the
abandonment of carbolic and other antiseptics which may irritate a wound
and by trusting to the agency of heat for killing all germs. But Lister
himself took enormous pains to keep his antiseptic as remote as possible
from the tissues to whose vitality he trusted, and went half-way to meet
the aseptic doctrine. If he retained a belief in the need for carbolic
and distrusted the elaborate ritual of the modern hospital, with its
boiling of everybody and everything connected with an operation, it was
not either from blindness or from pettiness of mind. As in the case of
abandoning the spray, it was his love of simplicity which influenced
him. If the detailed precautions of the complete aseptic system are
found practicable and beneficial in a hospital, they are difficult to
realize for a country surgeon who has to work in a humbler way, and
Lister wished his procedure to be within reach of every practitioner who
needed it.

One more point must be considered before pronouncing Listerism to be
superseded. In time of war there are occasions when necessity dictates
the treatment to be followed. Wounded men, picked up on the field of
battle some hours after they were hit, are not fit subjects for a method
that needs a clear field of operation. It is then too late for aseptic
precautions, as the wound may already be teeming with bacteria. Only the
prompt use of carbolic can stay the ravages of putrefaction; and
Lister's method, so often disparaged, must have saved the lives of
thousands during the late War.

In any case there is much common ground between the two schools: each
can learn from the other, and those professors of asepticism who have
acknowledged their debt to Lister have been wiser than those who have
made contention their aim. This was never the spirit in which he
approached scientific problems.

An earlier controversy, in which his name was involved, was that which
raged round the practice of vivisection. Here Lister had practically the
whole of his profession behind him when he boldly supported the claims
of science to have benefited humanity by the experiments conducted on
animals and to have done so with a minimum of suffering to the latter.
And it was well that science had a champion whose reputation for
gentleness and moderation was so well established. Queen Victoria
herself showed a lively interest in this fiercely-debated question; and
in 1871, when Lister was appealed to by Sir Henry Ponsonby, her private
secretary, to satisfy her doubts on the subject, he wrote an admirable
reply, calm in tone and lucid in statement, in which he showed how
unfounded were the charges brought against his profession.

In 1892 his professional career was drawing to a close. In that year he
received the heartiest recognition that France could give to his work,
when he went there officially to represent the Royal Society at the
Pasteur celebration. A great gathering of scientists and others,
presided over by President Carnot, came together at the Sorbonne to
honour Pasteur's seventieth birthday. It was a dramatic scene such as
our neighbours love, when the two illustrious fellow workers embraced
one another in public, and the audience rose to the occasion. To be
acclaimed with Pasteur was to Lister a crowning honour; but a year later
fortune dealt him a blow from which he never recovered. His wife, his
constant companion and helper, was taken ill suddenly at Rapallo on the
Italian Riviera, and died in a few days; and Lister's life was sadly
changed.

He was still considerably before the public for another decade. He did
much useful work for the Royal Society, of which he became Foreign
Secretary in 1893 and President from 1895 to 1900. He visited Canada and
South Africa, received the freedom of Edinburgh in 1898 and of London in
1907, and in 1897 he received the special honour of a peerage, the only
one yet conferred on a medical man. He took an active interest in the
discoveries of Koch and Metchnikoff, preserving to an advanced age the
capacity for accepting new ideas. He was largely instrumental in
founding the Institute of Preventive Medicine now established at Chelsea
and called by his name. But his work as a surgeon was complete before
death separated him from his truest helper. In 1903 his strength began
to fail, and for the last nine years of his life, at London or at
Walmer, he was shut off from general society and lived the life of an
invalid.

[Illustration: WILLIAM MORRIS

From the painting by G. F. Watts in the National Portrait Gallery]

In 1912 he passed away by almost imperceptible degrees, in his home
by the sea, and by his own request was buried in the quiet cemetery of
West Hampstead where his wife lay. A public service was held in
Westminster Abbey, and a portrait medallion there preserves the memory
of his features. The patient toil, the even temper, the noble purpose
which inspired his life, had achieved their goal--he was a national hero
as truly as any statesman or soldier of his generation; and if,
according to his nature he wished his body to lie in a humble grave, he
deserved full well to have his name preserved and honoured in our most
sacred national shrine.




WILLIAM MORRIS

1834-96


1834. Born at Walthamstow, March 24.
1848-51. Marlborough College.
1853-5. Exeter College, Oxford.
1856. Studies architecture under Street.
1857. Red Lion Square; influence of D. G. Rossetti.
1858. _Defence of Guenevere_.
1859. Marries Miss Jane Burden.
1860-5. 'Red House', Upton, Kent.
1861. Firm of Art Decorators founded in Queen Square, Bloomsbury.
(Dissolved and refounded 1875.)
1867-8. _Life and Death of Jason_. 1868-70. _Earthly Paradise_.
1870. Tenant of Kelmscott Manor House, on the Upper Thames.
1871-3. Visits to Iceland; work on Icelandic Sagas.
1876. _Sigurd the Volsung_.
1878. Tenant of Kelmscott House, Hammersmith.
1881. Works moved to Merton.
1883-4. Active member of Social Democratic Federation.
1884-90. Founder and active member of Socialist League.
1891. Kelmscott Press founded.
1892-6. Preparation and printing of Kelmscott _Chaucer_.
1896. Death at Hammersmith, October 3.
1896. Burial at Kelmscott, Oxfordshire.

WILLIAM MORRIS

CRAFTSMAN AND SOCIAL REFORMER


In general it is difficult to account for the birth of an original man
at a particular place and time. As Carlyle says: 'Priceless Shakespeare
was the free gift of nature, given altogether silently, received
altogether silently.' Of his childhood history has almost nothing to
relate, and what is true of Shakespeare is true in large measure of
Burns, of Shelley, of Keats. Even in an age when records are more
common, we can only discern a little and can explain less of the silent
influences at work that begin to make the man. There are few things more
surprising than that, in an age given up chiefly to industrial
development, two prosperous middle-class homes should have given birth
to John Ruskin and William Morris, so alien in temper to all that
traditionally springs from such a soil. In the case of Morris there is
nothing known of his ancestry to explain his rich and various gifts.
From a child he seemed to have found some spring within himself which
drew him instinctively to all that was beautiful in nature, in art, in
books. His earliest companions were the Waverley Novels, which he began
at the age of four and finished at seven; his earliest haunt was Epping
Forest, where he roamed and dreamed through many of the years of his
youth.

His father, who was in business in the City of London, as partner in a
bill-broking firm, lived at different times at Walthamstow and at
Woodford; and the hills of the forest, in some places covered with thick
growth of hornbeam or of beech, in others affording a wide view over the
levels of the lower Thames, impressed themselves so strongly on the
boy's memory and imagination that this scenery often recurred in the
setting of tales which he wrote in middle life.

There was no need of external aid to develop these tastes; and Morris
was fortunate in going to a school which did no violence to them by
forcing him into other less congenial pursuits. Marlborough College, at
the time when he went there in 1848, had only been open a few years. The
games were not organized but left to voluntary effort; and during his
three or four years at school Morris never took part in cricket or
football. In the latter game, at any rate, he should have proved a
notable performer on unorthodox lines, impetuous, forcible, and burly
as he was. But he found no reason to regret the absence of games, or to
feel that time hung heavy on his hands. The country satisfied his wants,
the Druidic stones at Avebury, the green water-meadows of the Kennet,
the deep glades of Savernake Forest. So strong was the spell of nature,
that he hardly felt the need for companionship; and, as chance had not
yet thrown him into close relations with any friend of similar tastes,
he lived much alone.

It was a different matter at Oxford, to which he proceeded in January
1853. Among those who matriculated at Exeter College that year was a
freshman from Birmingham named Edward Burne Jones; and within a few days
Morris had begun a friendship with him which lasted for his whole life
and was the source of his greatest happiness. For more than forty years
their names were associated, and so they will remain for generations to
come in Exeter College Chapel, where may be seen the great tapestry of
the Nativity designed by one and executed by the other. Burne-Jones had
not yet found his vocation as a painter; he came to Oxford like Morris
with the wish to take Holy Orders. He was of Welsh family with a Celtic
fervour for learning, and a Celtic instinct for what was beautiful, and
at King Edward's School he had made friends with several men who came up
to Pembroke College about the same time. Their friendship was extended
to his new acquaintance from Marlborough. Here Morris found himself in
the midst of a small circle who shared his enthusiasm for literature and
art, and among whom he quickly learned to express those ideas which had
been stirring his heart in his solitary youth. Through the knowledge
gained by close observation and a retentive memory, through his
impetuosity and swift decision, Morris soon became a leader among them.
Carlyle and Ruskin, Keats and Tennyson, were at this time the most
potent influences among them; and when Morris was not arguing and
declaiming in the circle at Pembroke, he was sitting alone with
Burne-Jones at Exeter reading aloud to him for hours together French
romances and other mediaeval tales. Young men of to-day, with a wealth
of books on their shelves and of pictures on their walls, with popular
reproductions bringing daily to their doors things old and new, can
little realize the thrill of excitement with which these men discovered
and enjoyed a single new poem of Tennyson or an early drawing by Millais
or Rossetti. How they were quickened by ever fresh delight in the beauty
and strangeness of such things, how they responded to the magic of
romance and dreamed of a day when they should themselves help in the
creation of such work, how they started a magazine of their own and
essayed short flights in prose or verse, can best be read in the volumes
which Lady Burne-Jones[50] has dedicated to the memory of her husband.
This period is of capital importance in the life of William Morris, and
the year 1855 especially was fraught with momentous decisions.

[Note 50: _Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones_, by G. B.-J., 2 vols.
(Macmillan, 1904).]

Like Burne-Jones he had gone up to Oxford intending to take Holy Orders
in the Church of England; but the last three years had taught him that
his interest lay elsewhere. The spirit of faith, of reverence, of love
for his fellow men still attracted him to Christianity; but he could not
subscribe to a body of doctrine or accept the authority of a single
Church. His ideal shifted gradually. At one time he hoped to found a
brotherhood which was to combine art with religion and to train
craftsmen for the service of the Church; but he was more fitted to work
in the world than in the cloister, and the social aspect of this
foundation prevailed over the religious. Nor was it mere self-culture to
which he aspired. The arts as he understood them were one field, and a
wide field, for enlarging the powers of men and increasing their
happiness, for continuing all that was most precious in the heritage of
the past and passing on the torch to the future; in this field there was
work for many labourers and all might be serving the common good.

His own favourite study was the thirteenth century, when princes and
merchants, monks and friars, poets and craftsmen had combined to exalt
the Church and to beautify Western Europe; and he wished to recreate the
nineteenth century in its spirit. And so while Burne-Jones discovered
his true gift in the narrower field of painting, Morris began his
apprenticeship in the master craft of architecture, and passed from one
art to another till he had covered nearly the whole field of endeavour
with ever-growing knowledge of principle and restless activity of hand
and eye. His father had died in 1847; and when Morris came of age he
inherited a fortune of about L900 a year and was his own master. Before
the end of 1855 he imparted to his mother his decision about taking
Orders. The Rubicon was crossed; but on which road he was to reach his
goal was not settled for many years. Twice he had to retrace his steps
from a false start and begin a fresh career. The year 1856 saw him still
working at Oxford, in the office of Street, the architect. Two more
years (1857-8) saw him labouring at easel pictures under the influence
of Rossetti, though he also published his first volume of poetry at this
time. The year 1859 found him married, and for the time absorbed in the
making of a home, but still feeling his way towards the choice of a
profession.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was in some ways the most original man of his
generation; certainly he was the only individual whose influence was
ever capable of dominating Morris and drawing him to a course of action
which he would not have chosen for himself. Rossetti's tragic collapse
after his wife's death, and the pictures which he painted in his later
life, have obscured the true portrait of this virile and attractive
character. Burne-Jones fell completely under his spell, and he tells us
how for many years his chief anxiety, over each successive work of art
that he finished, was 'what Gabriel would have thought of it'. So
decisive was his judgement, so dominating his personality.

Morris's period of hesitation ended in 1861, when the first firm of
decorators was started among the friends. Of the old Oxford set it
included Burne-Jones and Faulkner; new elements were introduced by
Philip Webb the architect and Madox Brown the painter. The leadership in
ideas might still perhaps belong to Rossetti; but in execution William
Morris proved himself at once the captain. The actual work which he
contributed in the first year was more than equal to that produced by
his six partners, and future years told the same tale.

In the early part of his married life Morris lived in Kent, at Upton,
some twelve miles from Charing Cross, in a house built for him by his
friend Webb. The house was of red brick, simple but unconventional in
character, built to be the home of one who detested stucco and all other
shams, and wished things to seem what they were. Its decoration was to
be the work of its owner and his friends.

Here we see Morris in the strength of early manhood and in all the
exuberance of his rich vigorous nature, surrounded by friends for whom
he kept open house, in high contentment with life, eager to respond to
all the claims upon his energy. Here came artists and poets, in the
pleasant summer days, jesting, dreaming, discussing, indulging in bouts
of single-stick or game of bowls in the garden, walking through the
country-side, quoting poets old and new, and scheming to cover the walls
and cupboards of the rooms with the legends of mediaeval romance.
Visitors of the conventional aesthetic type would have many a surprise
and many a shock. The jests often took the form of practical jokes, of
which Morris, from his explosive temper, was chosen to be the butt, but
which in the end he always shared and enjoyed. Rossetti, Burne-Jones,
and Faulkner would conspire to lay booby traps on the doors for him,
would insult him with lively caricatures, and with relentless humour
would send him to 'Coventry' for the duration of a dinner. Or he would
have a sudden tempestuous outbreak in which chairs would collapse and
door panels be kicked in and violent expletives would resound through
the hall. In all, Morris was the central figure, impatient, boisterous,
with his thick-set figure, unkempt hair, and untidy clothing, but with
the keenest appreciation and sympathy for any manifestation of beauty in
literature or in art. But this idyll was short-lived. Ill-health in the
Burne-Jones family was followed by an illness which befell Morris
himself; and the demand of the growing business and the need for the
master to be nearer at hand forced him to leave Upton. The Red House was
sold in 1865; and first Bloomsbury and later Hammersmith furnished him
with a home more conveniently placed.

The period of his return to London coincided with the most fruitful
period of his poetic work. Already at Oxford he had written some pieces
of verse which had found favour with his friends. He soon found that his
taste and his talent was for narrative poetry; and in 1856 he made
acquaintance with his two supreme favourites, Chaucer and Malory. It is
to them that he owes most in all that he produced in poetry or in prose,
and notably in the _Earthly Paradise_, which he published between 1868
and 1870. This consists of a collection of stories drawn chiefly from
Greek sources, but supposed to be told by a band of wanderers in the
fourteenth century. Thus the classic legends are seen through a veil of
mediaeval romance. He had no wish to step back, in the spirit of a
modern scholar, across the ages of ignorance or mist, and to pick up
the classic stones clear-cut and cold as the Greeks left them. To him
the legends had a continuous history up to the Renaissance; as they were
retold by Romans, Italians, or Provencals, they were as a plant growing
in our gardens, still putting out fresh shoots, not an embalmed corpse
such as later scholars have taught us to exhume and to study in the
chill atmosphere of our libraries and museums. This mediaevalism of his
was much misunderstood, both in literature and in art; people would talk
to him as if he were imitating the windows or tapestries of the Middle
Ages, whereas what he wanted was to recapture the technical secrets
which the true craftsmen had known and then to use these methods in a
live spirit to carry on the work to fresh developments in the future.

If the French tales of the fourteenth century were an inspiration to him
in his earliest poems, a second influence no less potent was that of the
Icelandic Sagas. He began to study them in 1869, and a little later,
with the aid of Professor Magnusson, he was translating some of them
into English. He made two journeys to Iceland, and was deeply moved by
the wild grandeur of the scenes in which these heroic tales were set.
For many successive days he rode across grim solitary wastes with more
enthusiasm than he could give to the wonted pilgrimages to Florence and
Venice. When he was once under the spell, only the geysers with their
suggestion of modern text-books and _Mangnall's Questions_[51] could
bore him; all else was magical and entrancing. This enthusiasm bore
fruit in _Sigurd the Volsung_, the most powerful of his epic poems,
written in an old English metre, which Morris, with true feeling for
craftsmanship, revived and adapted to his theme. His poetry in general,
less rich than that of Tennyson, less intense than that of Rossetti,
had certain qualities of its own, and owed its popularity chiefly to his
gift for telling a story swiftly, naturally and easily, and in such a
way as to carry his reader along with him.

[Note 51: Letter quoted in _Life of Morris_, by J. W. Mackail, vol.
i, p. 257 (Longmans, Green & Co., 1911).]

His fame was growing in London, which was ready enough in the nineteenth
century to make the most of its poets. In Society, if he had allowed it
to entertain him, he would have been a picturesque figure, though hardly
such as was expected by admirers of his poetry and his art. To some his
dress suggested only the prosperous British workman; to one who knew him
later he seemed like 'the purser of a Dutch brig' in his blue tweed
sailor-cut suit. This was his Socialist colleague Mr. Hyndman, who
describes 'his imposing forehead and clear grey eyes with the powerful
nose and slightly florid cheeks', and tells us how, when he was talking,
'every hair of his head and his rough shaggy beard appeared to enter
into the subject as a living part of himself.' Elsewhere he speaks of
Morris's 'quick, sharp manner, his impulsive gestures, his hearty
laughter and vehement anger'. At times Morris could be bluff beyond
measure. Stopford Brooke, who afterwards became one of his friends,
recounts his first meeting with Morris in 1867. 'He didn't care for
parsons, and he glared at me when I said something about good manners.
Leaning over the table with his eyes set and his fist clenched he
shouted at me, "I am a boor and the son of a boor".' So ready as he was
to challenge anything which smacked of conventionality or pretension, he
was not quite a safe poet to lionize or to ask into mixed company.

But it was less in literature than in art that he influenced his
generation, and we must return to the history of the firm. From small
beginnings it had established itself in the favourable esteem of the
few, and, thanks to exhibitions, its fame was spreading. Though as many
as twelve branches are mentioned in a single copy of its prospectus,
there was generally one department which for the moment occupied most of
the creative energy of the chief.

Painted glass is named first on the prospectus, and was one of the
earlier successes of the firm. As it was employed for churches more
often than for private houses, it is familiar to many who do not know
Morris's work in their homes; but it is hardly the most characteristic
of his activities. For one thing, the material, the 'pot glass', was
purchased, not made on the premises. Morris's skill lay in selecting the
best colours available rather than in creating them himself. For
another, he knew that his own education in figure-drawing was
incomplete, and he left this to other artists. Most of the figures were
designed by Burne-Jones, and some of the best-known examples of his
windows are at St. Philip's, Birmingham, near the artist's birthplace,
and at St. Margaret's, Rottingdean, where he died.[52] But no cartoon,
by Burne-Jones or any one else, was executed till Morris had supervised
the colour scheme; and he often designed backgrounds of foliage or
landscape.

[Note 52: Other easily accessible examples are in Christ Church
Cathedral, Oxford, and Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge.]

To those people of limited means who cannot afford tapestries and
embroidery (which follow painted glass on the firm's list), yet who wish
to beautify their homes, interest centres in the chintzes and
wall-papers. These show the distinctive gifts by which Morris most
widely influenced the Victorian traditions. It is not easy to explain
why one design stirs our curiosity and quickens our delight, while
another has the opposite effect. Critics can prate about natural and
conventional art without helping us to understand; but a passage from
Mr. Clutton-Brock seems worth quoting as simply and clearly phrased.[53]
'Morris would start', he says, 'with a pattern in his mind and from the
first saw everything as a factor in that pattern. But in these early
wall-papers he showed a power of pattern-making that has never been
equalled in modern times. For though everything is subject to the
pattern, yet the pattern itself expresses a keen delight in the objects
of which it is composed. So they are like the poems in which the words
keep a precise and homely sense and yet in their combination make a
music expressive of their sense.' Beginning with the design of the
rose-trellis in 1862, Morris laid under contribution many of the most
familiar flowers and trees. The daisy, the honeysuckle, the willow
branch, are but a few of the best known: each bears the stamp of his
inventive fancy and his cunning hand: each flower claims recognition for
itself, and reveals new charms in its appointed setting. Of these papers
we hear that Morris himself designed between seventy and eighty, and
when we add chintzes, tapestry, and other articles we may well be
astonished at the fertility of his brain.

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