BOOKS.
THE LIFE OF WILLIAM MORRIS.* MR. MAcKArr, might well, we think, have borrowed a word from the mediaeval times so dear to the subject of his bio- graphy, and called his book the " Legend " of William Morris. We do not mean merely that Mr. Mackail takes a high view of the character of Morris ; that goes without saying ; and if poets are to be canonised, no poet of this century can offer such proof of a miraculous element in his verse. But, however this may be, we make the suggestion for 'a simpler reason, and one complimentary to the author as much as to the subject. A legend is, after all, legendum, a sacred story to be read; and Mr. Mackail's book from the excellence of its proportions, the general sanity of its view (for the part of advocatus diaboli is not unrepresented), and the careful grace of its writing, deserves a solemn out-loud reading during refection upon the greater literary and artistic feasts ; all of it, that is to say, except the second hundred pages of the second volume, which deal with the Socialist propaganda, and cannot be read for "example of life" or "instruction in manners," if they can be read at all. To say that the volumes are, with this exception, excellently readable, and bear, as to their syntax, the extreme test of reading aloud, is, to the present reviewer, to make an admission somewhat against the grain ; his preference in biography being for the reminiscence in the manner of Aubrey, or if the thing were ever possible again, the reported conversa- tion in the manner of Boswell, rather than the smooth and detailed disquisition in elaborated paragraphs.
Anyhow, it is the reminiscences they contain which must give all volumes of biography their chief value. The stories here given are well chosen, and all add something to the revelation of character. The reader does not lightly forget, as an illustration of Morris's marvellous memory, the story of his describing the Church of Minster in Thanet in his old age, having only seen it once, fifty years before ; or as an illustra- tion of his Berserker furies, the story of the "prodigious effort of self-control" by which on one occasion "he swallowed his anger and only bit his fork," crushing it beyond recognition ; or as an illustration of his hatred of Renaissance architecture, the reply to an invitation to Rome : "Do you suppose that I should see anything in Rome that I can't see in Whitechapel?" The whole story, too, of the founding of the Society for Preserving Ancient Buildings, called familiarly by its founders the Anti-Scrape Society, is well told and full of interest ; especially delicious is the tale of how Carlyle was brought into it by a reaction from the apathy of Sir James Stephen, he himself having been previously as apathetic ; and how he uttered a panegyric on Wren (whom Morris hated) as a great man "of extraordinary patiencewith fools." Morris, for his part, did not "suffer fools gladly," as many sayings attest, such as his remark to the person of importance who thought the colouring of his carpets not sufficiently "subdued," that "if he wanted dirt he could find plenty in the road." An interesting chapter gives the story of the revival of the old system of vegetable dyeing, especially the long fight with the indigo vat, whose enchanting beauty and capricious temper seem to have well deserved the dyers' use of the feminine pronoun for it. But of all the reminiscences the most welcome are those contributed by the Rev. R. W. Dixon, one of the original Oxford Brother- hood, and known now to those who read as the author of a singularly fascinating history. Here is a passage about the Oxford life in 1853 :—
" At first Morris was regarded by the Pembroke men simply as a very pleasant boy (the least of us was senior by a term to him) who was fond of talking, which he did in a husky shout, and fond of going down the river with Faulkner, who was a good boating man. He was very fond of sailing a boat. He was also extremely fond of single-stick and a good fencer. In no long time, however, the great characters of his nature ban to impress us. His fire and impetuosity, great bodily strength, and high temper were soon manifested : and were sometimes astonishing. But his mental qualities, his intellect, also began to be perceived and acknowledged. I remember Faulkner remarking to me, How Morris seems to know things, doesn't he ? ' And then it struck me that it was so. I ob- served how decisive he was : how accurate, without any effort or formality : what an extraordinary power of observation lay at the base of many of his casual or incidental remarks, and how many things he knew that were quite out of the way One night Orom Price and I went to Exeter and found him with Burne-Jones.
• 7U Life of Willtam Morris. By J. W. Mackail. 2 vols. London ; LoDgmans and 0o. DX]
As soon as we entered the room, Burns-Jones exclaimed wildly, He's a big poet.'—' Who is ? ' asked we. Why, Topsy '—the name which we had given him. We sat down and heard Morris read his first poem, the first he had ever written in his life. It was called The Willow and the Bed Cliff.' As he read it, I felt that it was
something the like of which had never been heard before cannot recollect what took place afterwards, but I expressed my admiration in some way, as we all did, and I remember his remark, Well, if this is poetry, it is very easy to write.' " Mr. Mackail tells us that these early poems were all destroyed when Morris put together his "Defence of Guenevere" volume in 1858; and Mr. Dixon assures us that the loss is deplorable. Morris as a poet, in his judgment, "reached his perfection at once." In later life he was inclined himself to deride inspiration, and reckon poetry as much a result of craftsmanship as designing wall-papers (I., 186). The objection to the theory in his case lies in the fact that the craftsman- ship is always the weakest part of his poetry, and that he always found correction impossible, though he would some- times rewrite. His early poetry was the simple transcription of his waking dreams ; pictures of a world that he knew with a lover's intimacy, and yet saw always in a dreamlight of fancy, and instinctively peopled with the men and women of the times of chivalry. A song given by Mr. Mackail from the romance of the "Hollow Land" has always seemed to the present writer, since, as an undergraduate, he first read it in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, typically Morrisian :— "Christ keep the Hollow Land
All the summer tide ; Still we cannot understand Where the waters glide; Only dimly seeing them Coldly slipping through Many green-lipp'd cavern months, Where the hills are blue."
Of the merits and defects of Morris's later poetry Mr. Mackail writes with admirable judgment; his criticism of "Sigurd "and of "Love is Enough," and his remarks upon the versions of Virgil and Homer, strike us as full of insight, and we should like to see them expanded into an essay. But Mr. Mackail has already made his reputation as a critic of literature, and therefore as a specimen of his work we prefer to give an ex- tract that shows what he can do as a critic of men. The whole passage 93-94) is very interesting, but a single paragraph is all there is room for :— " Morris had himself always been one of the people to whom per- sonal matters bear far less than their normal share in life. He was interested in things much more than in people. He had the capacity for loyal friendships and for deep affections ; but even of these one might almost say that they did not penetrate to the central part of him. The thing done, the story, or the building, or the picture, or whatever it might be, was what he cared about in the work of his contemporaries and friends no less than in that of other ages or countries : and in his mind these things seem to have been quite in- dependent of the story-teller, or the architect, or the painter, and not merely substantive things, but one might almost say substantive personalities. So, too, in the ordinary concerns of life he was strangely incurious of individuals. On one side this quality of mind took the form of an absolute indifference to gossip and scandal, and a capacity of working with the most unsympathetic or disagreeable colleagues, so long as they were helping on the particular work in hand. On the other it resulted in an almost equally marked inconsiderateness. He sometimes seemed to have the aloofness of some great natural force. For sympathy in distress, for soothing in trouble, it was not to him that one would have gone. The lot of the poor, as a class,
when he thought of it, had always lain heavily on his spirit. But the sufferings of individuals often only moved him to a certain impatience."
And then follows a contrast between Morris and Rossetti in the matter of generosity. Another interesting parallel between Morris and Dr. Johnson comes later on. A more in- teresting likeness still was suggested by a friend of Morris's. "The figure seen by him one evening, in the cloak and satchel, the soft hat pulled down over his eyes, and the stick firmly grasped and held point forward as he walked straight on, seeming to see nothing of all that was around him—yet in fact seeing it and taking it all in with incomparable swiftness— through the glare and bustle of the Strand, was like one other person and one only, Christian passing through Vanity Fair."
The suggestion seems to us peculiarly happy, as marking the aloofness of Morris from the ordinary desires and aims of his generation. "My work," he had said when he was twenty- three, "is the embodiment of dreams in one form or another," and from first to last he pursued the ideal as it revealed itself to him,—namely, as a vision of beauty to be expressed by his art. In this he found his happiness, and in this he con- ceived lay the way to happiness for mankind. Luckily for those of us who are not artists there are other avenues which open upon the infinite besides this one way of art. Beauty is truth, but not the whole of truth, and our fathers who begat us in the early Victorian days were not on the whole worse men than we who hang our walls with Morris papers. The moral effect of art is, in feet, pretty well limited to the artist ; and to do Morris justice, it was to the artisan that he made his appeal, and not to the middle-class customer, except in so far as by his zest for cheapening he demoralised the artisan. Morris's Socialism was his attempt to free the artisan from the demoralising dictation of the middle class, so that he might have some joy in his labour ; and though the actual result of his going down into the street to "strive and cry" was not large, there are few perhaps of those who love him at all who do not love him the better for it. The letters in these volumes are not the least valuable part of them ; they are all written with a charming simplicity and frankness, and fre- quently vivified with a phrase of piquant fun, or some illuminating touch of imagination.
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