Victorian Worthies

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[Note 53: _William Morris_, by A. Clutton-Brock (Williams and
Norgate, 1914).]

Even so, much must have depended on his workmen as the firm's operations
extended.

Mr. Mackail tells us of the faith which Morris had in the artistic
powers of the average Englishman, if rightly trained. He was ready to
take and train the boy whom he found nearest to hand, and he often
achieved surprising results. His own belief was that a good tradition
once established in the workshops, by which the workman was allowed to
develop his intelligence, would of itself produce good work: others
believed that the successes would have been impossible without the
unique gifts of the master, one of which was that he could intuitively
select the right man for each job.

The material as well as the workers needed this selective power. The
factories of the day had accustomed the public to second-rate material
and second-rate colour, and Morris was determined to set a higher
standard. In 1875 he was absorbed in the production of vegetable dyes,
which he insisted on having pure and rich in tone. Though madder and
weld might supply the reds and yellows which he needed, blue was more
troublesome. For a time he accepted prussian blue, but he knew that
indigo was the right material, and to indigo he gave days of
concentrated work, preparing and watching the vats, dipping the wool
with his own hands (which often bore the stain of work for longer than
he wished), superintending the minutest detail and refusing to be
content with anything short of the best. But these two qualities of
industry and of aiming at a high standard would not have carried him so
far if he had not added exceptional gifts of nature. With him hand and
eye worked together as in few craftsmen of any age; and thus he could
carry his experiments to a successful end, choosing his material, mixing
his colours, and timing his work with exact felicity. And when he had
found the right way he had the rare skill to communicate his knowledge
to others and thus to train them for the work.

Queen Square, Bloomsbury, was the first scene of his labours; but as the
firm prospered and the demands for their work grew, Morris found the
premises too small. At one time he had hopes of finding a suitable spot
near the old cloth-working towns at the foot of the Cotswolds, where
pure air and clear water were to be found; but the conditions of trade
made it necessary for him to be nearer to London. In 1881 he bought an
old silk-weaving mill at Merton near Wimbledon, on the banks of the
Wandle, and this is still the centre of the work.

To study special industries, or to execute a special commission, he was
often obliged to make long journeys to the north of England or
elsewhere; but the routine of his life consisted in daily travelling
between his house at Hammersmith and the mills at Merton, which was
more tiresome than it is to-day owing to the absence of direct connexion
between these districts. But his energy overbore these obstacles; and,
except when illness prevented him, he remained punctual in his
attendance to business and in close touch with all his workers. Towards
them Morris was habitually generous. The weaker men were kept on and
paid by time, long after they had ceased to produce remunerative work,
while the more capable were in course of time admitted as profit-sharers
into the business. Every man who worked under him had to be prepared for
occasional outbursts of impatient temper, when Morris spoke, we are
told, rather as a good workman scornful of bad work, than as an employer
finding fault with his men; but in the long run all were sure to receive
fair and friendly treatment.

Such was William Morris at his Merton works, a master craftsman worthy
of the best traditions of the Middle Ages, fit to hold his place with
the masons of Chartres, the weavers of Bruges, and the wood-carvers of
Nuremberg. As a manager of a modern industrial firm competing with
others for profit he was less successful. The purchasing of the best
material, the succession of costly experiments, the 'scrapping' of all
imperfect work, meant a heavy drain on the capital. Also the society had
been hurriedly formed without proper safeguards for fairly recompensing
the various members according to their work; and when in 1875 it was
found necessary to reconstitute it, that Morris might legally hold the
position which he had from the outset won by his exertions, this could
not be effected without loss, nor without a certain friction between the
partners. So, however prosperous the business might seem to be through
its monopoly of certain wares, it was difficult even for a skilful
financier to make on each year a profit which was in any way
proportionate to the fame of the work produced. But in 1865 Morris was
fortunate in finding a friend ready to undertake the keeping of the
books, who sympathized with his aims and whose gifts supplemented his
own; and, for the rest, he had read and digested the work of Ruskin, and
had learnt from him that the function of the true merchant was to
produce goods of the best quality, and only secondarily to produce a
profitable balance-sheet.

How it was that from being the head of an industrial business Morris
came to be an ardent advocate of Socialism is the central problem of his
life. The root of the matter lay in his love of art and of the Middle
Ages. He had studied the centuries productive of the best art known to
him, and he believed that he understood the conditions under which it
was produced. The one essential was that the workers found pleasure in
their work. They were not benumbed by that Division of Labour which set
the artisan laboriously repeating the same mechanical task; they worked
at the bidding of no master jealously measuring time, material, and
price against his competitors; they passed on from one generation to
another the tradition of work well done for its own sake. He knew there
was another side to the picture, and that in many ways the freedom of
the mediaeval craftsman had been curtailed. He did not ask history to
run backwards, but he felt that the nineteenth century was advancing on
the wrong line of progress. To him there seemed to be three types of
social framework. The feudal or Tory type was past and obsolete; for the
richer classes of to-day had neither the power nor the will to renew it.
The Whig or Manchester ideal held the field, the rich employer regarding
his workmen as so many hands capable of producing so much work and so
much profit, and believing that free bargaining between free men must
yield the best economic results for all classes, and that beyond
economic and political liberty the State had no more to give, and a man
must be left to himself. Against this doctrine emphatic protests had
been uttered in widely differing forms by Carlyle and Disraeli, by
Ruskin and Dickens; but it was slow to die.

The third ideal was that of the Socialist; and to Morris this meant that
the State should appropriate the means of production and should so
arrange that every worker was assured of the means of livelihood and of
sufficient leisure to enjoy the fruits of what he had made. He who could
live so simply himself thought more of the unjust distribution of
happiness than of wealth, as may be seen in his _News from Nowhere_,
where he gives a Utopian picture of England as it was to be after the
establishment of Socialism. Here rather than in polemical speeches or
pamphlets can we find the true reflection of his attitude and the way in
which he thought about reform.

It was not easy for him to embark on such a crusade. In his early
manhood, except for his volunteering in the war scare of 1859, he had
taken no part in public life. The first cause which led to his appearing
at meetings was wrath at the ill-considered restoration of old
buildings. In 1877, when a society was formed for their protection,
Morris was one of the leaders, and took his stand by Ruskin, who had
already stated the principles to be observed. They believed that the
presentation of nineteenth-century masonry in the guise of mediaeval
work was a fraud on the public, that it obscured the true lessons of the
past, and that, under the pretence of reviving the original design, it
marred the development which had naturally gone forward through the
centuries. It was from his respect for work and the workman that Morris
denounced this pedantry, from his love of stones rightly hewn and laid,
of carving which the artist had executed unconsciously in the spirit of
his time, and which was now being replaced by lifeless imitation to the
order of a bookish antiquary. Against this he was ready to protest at
all times, and references to meetings of 'Antiscrape', as he calls the
society, are frequent in his letters. He also was rigid in declining all
orders to the firm where his own decorations might seem to disturb the
relics of the past.

His next step was still more difficult. The plunge of a famous poet and
artist into agitation, of a capitalist and employer into Socialism,
provoked much wonder and many indignant protests. His severer critics
seized on any pamphlet of his in which they could detect logical
fallacies and scornfully asked whether this was fit work for the author
of the _Earthly Paradise_. Many liberal-minded people indeed regretted
the diversion of his activities, but the question whether he was wasting
them is one that needs consideration; and to judge him fairly we must
look at the problem from his side and postulate that Socialism (whether
he interpreted its theories aright or not) did pursue practical ideals.
If Aeschylus was more proud of fighting at Marathon than of writing
tragedies--if Socrates claimed respect as much for his firmness as a
juryman as for his philosophic method--surely Morris might believe that
his duty to his countrymen called him to leave his study and his
workshop to take an active part in public affairs. He might be more
prone to error than those who had trained themselves to political life,
but he faced the problems honestly and sacrificed his comfort for the
common good.

Criticism took a still more personal turn in the hands of those who
pointed out that Morris himself occupied the position of a capitalist
employer, and who asked him to live up to his creed by divesting himself
of his property and taking his place in the ranks of the proletariat.
This argument is dealt with by Mr. Mackail,[54] who describes the steps
which Morris took to admit his foremen to sharing the profits of the
business, and defends him against the charge of inconsistency. Morris
may not have thought out the question in all its aspects, but much of
the criticism passed upon him was even more illogical and depended on
far too narrow and illiterate a use of the word Socialism. He knew as
well as his critics that no new millennium could be introduced by merely
taking the wealth of the rich and dividing it into equal portions among
the poor.

[Note 54: _Life of Morris_, by J. W. Mackail, vol. ii, pp. 133-9.]

However reluctant Morris might be to leave his own work for public
agitation, he plunged into the Socialist campaign with characteristic
energy. For two or three years he was constantly devoting his Sundays to
open-air speech-making, his evenings to thinly-attended meetings in
stuffy rooms in all the poorer parts of London; and, at the call of
comrades, he often travelled into the provinces, and even as far as
Scotland, to lend a hand. And he spent time and money prodigally in
supporting journals which were to spread the special doctrines of his
form of Socialism. Nor was it only the indifference and the hostility of
those outside which he had to meet; quarrels within the party were
frequent and bitter, though Morris himself, despite his impetuous
temper, showed a wonderful spirit of brotherliness and conciliation. For
two years his work lay with the Socialist Democratic Federation, till
differences of opinion with Mr. Hyndman drove him to resign; in 1885 he
founded the Socialist League, and for this he toiled, writing, speaking,
and attending committees, till 1889, when the control was captured by a
knot of anarchists, in spite of all his efforts. After this he ceased to
be a 'militant'; but in no way did he abandon his principles or despair
of the ultimate triumph of the cause. The result of his efforts must
remain unknown. If the numbers of his audiences were often
insignificant, and the visible outcome discouraging to a degree, yet in
estimating the value of personal example no outward test can satisfy us.
He gave of his best with the same thoroughness as in all his crafts, and
no man can do more. But, looking at the matter from a regard to his
special gifts and to his personal happiness, we may be glad that his
active connexion with Socialism ceased in 1889, and that he was granted
seven years of peace before the end.

These were the years that saw the birth and growth of the 'Kelmscott'
printing press, so called after his country house. Of illuminated
manuscripts[55] he had always been fond, but it was only in 1888 that
his attention was turned to details of typography. The mere study of old
and new founts did not satisfy him for long; the creative impulse
demanded that he should design types of his own and produce his own
books. As in the other arts, his lifelong friend Burne-Jones was called
in to supply figure drawings for the illustrated books which Morris was
himself to adorn with decorative borders and initials. Of his many
schemes, not all came to fruition; but after four years of planning, and
a year and a half given to the actual process of printing, his
masterpiece, the Kelmscott edition of Chaucer, was completed, and a copy
was in his hands a few months before his death.

[Note 55: Mr. Hyndman (_Story of an Adventurous Life_, p. 355)
describes a visit to the Bodleian Library at Oxford with Morris, and how
'quickly, carefully, and surely' he dated the illuminated manuscripts.]

The last seven years of his life were spent partly at Hammersmith and
partly at Kelmscott, the old manor house, lying on the banks of the
Upper Thames, which he had tenanted since 1878. He had never been a
great traveller, dearly though he loved the north of France with its
Gothic cathedrals and 'the river bottoms with the endless poplar forests
and the green green meadows'. His tastes were very individual. Iceland
made stronger appeals to him than Greece or Rome; and even at Florence
and Venice he was longing to return to England and its homely familiar
scenes. Scotland with its bare hills, 'raw-boned' as he called it, never
gave him much pleasure; for he liked to see the earth clothed by nature
and by the hand of man. By the Upper Thames, at the foot of the
Cotswolds, the buildings of the past were still generally untouched; and
beyond the orchards and gardens, with their old-world look, lay
stretches of meadows, diversified by woods and low hills, haunted with
the song of birds; and he could believe himself still to be in the
England of Chaucer and Shakespeare. There he would always welcome the
friends whom he loved and who loved him; but to the world at large he
was a recluse. His abrupt manner, his Johnsonian utterances, would have
made him a disconcerting element in Victorian tea-parties. When provoked
by foolish utterances, he was, no less than Johnson, downright in
contradiction. There was nothing that he disliked so much as being
lionized; and there was much to annoy him when he stepped outside his
own home and circle. His last public speech was made on the abuses of
public advertisement; and in the last year of his life we hear him
growling in Ruskinian fashion that he was ever 'born with a sense of
romance and beauty in this accursed age'.

His life had been a strenuous and exhausting one, but he enjoyed it to
the last. As he said to Hyndman ten days before the end, 'It has been a
jolly good world to me when all is said, and I don't wish to leave it
yet awhile'. At least his latter years had been years of peace. He had
been freed from the stress of conflict; he had found again the joys of
youth, and could recapture the old music.

The days have slain the days, and the seasons have gone by
And brought me the summer again; and here on the grass I lie
As erst I lay and was glad, ere I meddled with right and wrong.

After an illness in 1891 he never had quite the same physical vigour,
though he continued to employ himself fully for some years in a way
which would tax the energy of many robust men. In 1895 the vital energy
was failing, and he was content to relax his labours. In August 1896 he
was suffering from congestion of the lungs, and in October he died
peacefully at Hammersmith, attended by the loving care of his wife and
his oldest friends. The funeral at Kelmscott was remarkable for
simplicity and beauty, the coffin being borne along the country road in
a farm wagon strewn with leaves; and he lies in the quiet churchyard
amid the meadows and orchards which he loved so well.

Among the prophets and poets who took up their parable against the
worship of material wealth and comfort, he will always have a foremost
place. The thunder of Carlyle, the fiery eloquence of Ruskin, the
delicate irony of Matthew Arnold, will find a responsive echo in the
heart of one reader or another; will expose the false standards of life
set up in a materialistic age and educate them in the pursuit of what is
true, what is beautiful, and what is reasonable. But to men who work
with their hands there must always be something specially inspiring in
the life and example of one who was a handicraftsman and so much beside.
And Morris was not content to denounce and to despair. He enjoyed what
was good in the past and the present, and he preached in a hopeful
spirit a gospel of yet better things for the future. He was an artist in
living. Amid all the diversity of his work there was an essential unity
in his life. The men with whom he worked were the friends whom he
welcomed in his leisure; the crafts by which he made his wealth were the
pastimes over which he talked and thought in his home; his dreams for
the future were framed in the setting of the mediaeval romances which he
loved from his earliest days. Though he lived often in an atmosphere of
conflict, and often knew failure, he has left us an example which may
help to fill the emptiness and to kindle the lukewarmness of many an
unquiet heart, and may reconcile the discords that mar the lives of too
many of his countrymen in this age of transition and of doubt.

[Illustration: JOHN RICHARD GREEN

From a drawing by Frederick Sandys]

JOHN RICHARD GREEN

1837-83

1837. Born at Oxford, December 12.
1845-52. Magdalen College School, Oxford.
1852-4. With a private tutor.
1855-9. Jesus College, Oxford.
1861-3. Curate at Goswell Road, E.C.
1863-4. Curate at Hoxton.
1864-9. Mission Curate and Rector of St. Philip's, Stepney.
1869. Abandons parochial work. Librarian at Lambeth Palace.
1867-73. Contributor to _Saturday Review_.
1874. _Short History of the English People_ published.
1877. Marries Miss Alice Stopford.
1877-80. Four volumes of larger _History of the English People_ published.
1880-1. Winter in Egypt.
1882. January, _Making of England_ published.
1883. January, _Conquest of England_ finished (published posthumously).
Last illness. Death, March 7.

JOHN RICHARD GREEN

HISTORIAN

The eighteenth century did some things with a splendour and a
completeness which is the despair of later, more restlessly striving
generations. Barren though it was of poetry and high imagination, it
gave birth to our most famous works in political economy, in biography,
and in history; and it has set up for us classic models of imperishable
fame. But the wisdom of Adam Smith, the shrewd observation of Boswell,
the learning of Gibbon, did not readily find their way into the
market-place. Outside of the libraries and the booksellers' rows in
London and Edinburgh they were in slight demand. Even when the volumes
of Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson had been added to the library shelves,
where Clarendon and Burnet reigned before them, too often they only
passed to a state of dignified retirement and slumber. No hand disturbed
them save that of the conscientious housemaid who dusted them in due
season. They were part of the furnishings indispensable to the elegance
of a 'gentleman's seat'; and in many cases the guests, unless a Gibbon
were among them, remained ignorant whether the labels on their backs
told a truthful tale, or whether they disguised an ingenious box or
backgammon board, or formed a mere covering to the wall.

The fault was with the public more than with the authors. Those who
ventured on the quest would find noble eloquence in Clarendon, lively
narrative in Burnet, critical analysis in Hume; but the indolence of the
Universities and the ignorance of the general public unfitted them for
the effort required to value a knowledge of history or to take steps to
acquire it. It is true that the majestic style of Clarendon was puzzling
to a generation accustomed to prose of the fashion inaugurated by Dryden
and Addison; and that Hume and other historians, with all their
precision and clearness, were wanting in fervour and imagination. But
the record of English history was so glorious, so full of interest for
the patriot and for the politician, that it should have spoken for
itself, and the apathy of the educated classes was not creditable to
them. Even so Ezekiel found the Israelites of his day, forgetful of
their past history and its lessons, sunk in torpor and indifference. He
looked upon the wreckage of his nation, settled in the Babylonian plain;
in his fervent imagination he saw but a valley of dry bones, and called
aloud to the four winds that breath should come into them and they
should live.

In our islands the prophets who wielded the most potent spell came from
beyond the Border. Walter Scott exercised the wider influence, Carlyle
kindled the intenser flame. As artists they followed very different
methods. Scott, like a painter, wielding a vigorous brush full charged
with human sympathies, set before us a broad canvas in lively colours
filled with a warm diffused light. Carlyle worked more in the manner of
an etcher, the mordant acid eating deep into the plate. From the depth
of his shadows would stand out single figures or groups, in striking
contrast, riveting the attention and impressing themselves on the
memory. Scott drew thousands of readers to sympathize with the men and
women of an earlier day, and to feel the romance that attaches to lost
causes in Church and State. Carlyle set scores of students striving to
recreate the great men of the past and by their standards to reject the
shibboleths of the present. However different were the methods of the
enchanters, the dry bones had come to life. Mediaeval abbot and
crusader, cavalier and covenanter, Elizabeth and Cromwell, spoke once
more with a living voice to ears which were opened to hear.

Nor did the English Universities fail to send forth men who could meet
the demands of a generation which was waking up to a healthier political
life. The individual who achieved most in popularizing English history
was Macaulay, who began to write his famous Essays in 1825, the year
after he won his fellowship at Trinity, though the world had to wait
another twenty-five years for his History of the English Revolution.
Since then Cambridge historians like Acton, or Maitland, have equalled
or excelled him in learning, though none has won such brilliant success.
But it was the Oxford School which did most, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, to clear up the dark places of our national record
and to present a complete picture of the life of the English people.
Freeman delved long among the chronicles of Normans and Saxons; Stubbs
no less laboriously excavated the charters of the Plantagenets; Froude
hewed his path through the State papers of the Tudors; while Gardiner
patiently unravelled the tangled skein of Stuart misgovernment. John
Richard Green, one of the youngest of the school, took a wider subject,
the continuous history of the English people. He was fortunate in
writing at a time when the public was prepared to find the subject
interesting, but he himself did wonders in promoting this interest, and
since then his work has been a lamp to light teachers on the way.

In a twofold way Green may claim to be a child of Oxford. Not only was
he a member of the University, but he was a native of the town, being
born in the centre of that ancient city in the year of Queen Victoria's
accession. His family had been engaged in trade there for two
generations without making more than a competence; and even before his
father died in 1852 they were verging on poverty. Of his parents, who
were kind and affectionate, but not gifted with special talents, there
is little to be told; the boy was inclined, in after life, to attribute
any literary taste that he may have inherited to his mother. From his
earliest days reading was his passion, and he was rarely to be seen
without a book. Old church architecture and the sound of church bells
also kindled his childish enthusiasms, and he would hoard his pence to
purchase the joy of being admitted into a locked-up church. So he was
fortunate in being sent at the age of eight to Magdalen College School,
where he had daily access to the old buildings of the College and the
beautiful walks which had been trodden by the feet of Addison a century
and a half before. An amusing contrast could be drawn between the
decorous scholar of the seventeenth century, handsome, grave of mien,
calmly pacing the gravel walk, while he tasted the delights of classic
literature, and little 'Johnny Green', a mere shrimp of a boy with
bright eyes and restless ways, darting here and there, eagerly searching
for anything new or exciting which he might find, whether in the bushes
or in the pages of some romance which he was carrying.

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