Art
Morris and Co.
By HUGH GRAHAM Two exhibitions, one at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the other at the Geffrye Museum, King- land Road, E2, celebrate the formation a hundred years ago of Morris and Company. The company was described by its founder, William Morris, as 'a sort of firm for producing decorative articles.' Its purpose was nothing less than to create a complete revolution in English- taste. Through Morris's courage, energy and propaganda it almost succeeded. Through his repudiation of the inevitable it failed. Politically he could understand why the materialistic society called into being by the Industrial Revolution had to reform or perish, but emotionally he was unable to envisage how this reformation could be brought about except by a return to what he considered the simplicity and purity of the Middle Ages.
Morris and Company offered the Victorians furniture and decoration in harmony with their loftiest ideas. Its wares were Christian, because inspired by the Age of Faith; democratic, be- cause fashioned by artists and craftsmen working on equal terms; unworldly, because unluxurious both in function and material; scholarly, because adapted from ancient prototypes. By the end of the century these ideals may have become com- mon, but when Morris founded his company, they were, on the evidence of fellow-reformers like Ruskin, Arnold and Carlyle, very rare.
Only if we bear this in mind can we begin to understand how an object such as the 'St. George' cabinet in the Victoria and Albert exhibition can ever have been considered revolu- tionary. This unhappy pastiche of a medixval coffer, painted with quaint Gothic scenes divided by borders of daisies and shells, was displayed at the international exhibition of 1862, where the Company enjoyed its first public success. Included in the same exhibition were some stained-glass windows designed by Rossetti. something called 'King Renee's Honeymoon Cabinet,' and a num- ber of embroideries which the Ecelesiologist described as 'Some most antique-looking tapestry hangings.' Placed beside the house furnishings of sixty years earlier, these decorative pieces would have appeared ornate, impractical, and not so much nostalgic as downright atavistic. Compared with the standard productions of most Victorian furniture manufacturers—heavy, bulbous traves- ties of Chippendale or Louis Seize designs—they must have seemed radiantly spiritual.
Such objects as the 'St. George' cabinet were Morris's showpieces, ideological ornaments which embodied his whole vision of life. Simpli- city, on which he placed such value, meant for him simplicity of spirit rather than of design. 'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,' he wrote. A complete absence of ornament was per- missible in the useful, but the beautiful had to evoke poetic associations, which for Morris could only mean reminiscences of a far-off, chivalrous past. The decorative pieces from the Morris workshop were therefore rich with Gothic ornament or painted with scenes from Gothic romance.
Morris and Burne-Jones were both influenced by Ruskin, whom they sometimes referred to as their master. During their years together at Exeter College they had welcomed The Stones of Venice as a sort of Bible, especially the sixth chapter, 'On the Nature of Gothic,' By the time the company was formed, Ruskin had become the arbiter of taste in England, but the effects of his teaching were confined chiefly to painting and architecture. In consequence Morris had a ready-made market in Ruskin's disciples, many of them rich and only too anxious to take part in the great spiritual and imaginative Renais- sance by patronising craftsmen-designers who conformed to his ideals. Morris and Company established themselves so completely that by 1883 the Spectator could write that —Morris" has become a household word for all who wish their material surroundings to be beautiful yet appro- priate for homely use, "neat not gaudy," English in taste, not French. . . . Nearly all the better kind of designs in the shops are, as far as they are good, cribs from Morris, just altered suffi- ciently to prevent unpleasantness.'
Towards the end of the century Morris and Company's designs grew somewhat more elegant That section of fashionable society which liked to describe itself as 'The Souls' had their county' houses designed by Philip Webb and their walk hung with idylls by Burne-Jones. Their taste in furniture was less influenced by ideological con- siderations than by the dictates of comfort: simplicity they admired, but the serviceable simplicity of a Queen Anne chair, which you can sit on with pleasure. Compared with Morris's first patrons, these Wyndhanis and Charterises and Asquiths were easy-going hedonists. They liked comfortable furniture, large, light rooms and an atmosphere of refined informality; Webb himself gave up Gothic for Queen Anne, Burne- Jones, always rather lady-like, became refined to the point of anaemia, and the wares of Morris and Company, if they lost some of their early robustness, acquired a languid gracefulness as suitable for the enlightened mansion as for the cultured vicarage. Wallpaper and chintz became their principal products. These are Morris's finest contribUtions to the decorative arts. His extra- ordinary gift for continuous pattern is best dis- played in such designs as 'Honeysuckle,' Rose and Lily' and 'Blackthorn' which, although they all derive from medixval floriated ornament, are so close to abstraction that they seem refreshingly free from his usual Pre-Raphaelite affectations.
From Edwardian times on, the company slowly faded away. All over England little arts and crafts shops competed with it, plagiarising its wares. A- small section of the middle class re- mained loyal, but owing to its inability to com- promise with modern industrialism, the com- pany's goods grew more and more expensive. Morris's disciples continued faithfully to loathe the factory system and champion cottage in- dustry, and to refuse to touch most of the materials of modern technology. This spirit of negation grew more and more stifling. Finally, in 1940, the company was forced to close down.
It is possible that Morris's contribution to the decorative arts was the least important part of his achievement. As a poet he was more sensitive and as a Socialist more effective. Because of his loathing for every manifestation of the nine- teenth century, the arts and crafts movement which he started was doomed to play only a small provincial role in the development of European art, since it involved a self-conscious return to styles and methods long superseded. An uncritical passion for the Middle Ages made it impossible for him to appreciate what was truly original in his own time. In 1893, after paintings by Manet and Degas had been shown in London, he wrote, 'The modern Impressionists loudly proclaim their enmity to beauty.' In The Earthly Paradise he had called himself a 'Dreamer of dreams born out of my due time.' What he failed to realise was that dreamers who are positively pleased to belong to an earlier age may start out as revolutionaries but invariably end up as retardataires.
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