WILLIAM MORRIS.* IN some respects this record of William Morris
has a special interest and attraction. The reproduction of the artist's beautiful designs will make the volume welcome to all readers interested in decorative art, and Mr. Vallance's elaborate history of the firm which owed its existence to the energy and resources of the poet is a solid piece of work that may prove of lasting value.
Morris was so richly gifted, and exhibited his rare genius in so many ways, that a volume like this might be almost said
• William Mcaris: his Art, his Writing% and his Public Life. A Record by Aymt r Valiance. London ; G. Bell and Dark [25st net.]
to demand a corresponding versatility on the part of the author. Mr. Valiance has two merits which have served him in good stead in this compilation. He has given much labour to the work, and he has written it with an admiration which, if it be sometimes wanting in judgment, shows that he pos. sesses the faculty so highly valued by Carlyle, of appreciating a hero. We call the record a compilation because a large portion consists of the republication of criticisms on Morris by well-known authors and by anonymous reviewers. These copious extracts may be a sign of Mr. Vallance's modesty, but they lessen the value of the book as an original work. He has, however, sufficient knowledge of his subject to stand without these props, and the reader will regret that he did not exercise a more independent judgment.
The volume opens with a slight but satisfactory account of Morris's youthful days. He was born, as he says, on the edge of Epping Forest, of the mismanagement of which he had much to say in after years; and from Walter Scott he gained his earliest inspirations. At the age of seven, we are told, he had read the greater part, if not the whole, of Scott's works, and in mature life he read them still :—
"How well I remember as a boy," he says, "my first acquaint- ance with a room hung with faded greenery at Queen Elizabeth's Lodge, by Chingford Hatch, in Epping Forest, and the impression of romance that it made upon me ! a feeling that always comes back on me when I read, as I often do, Sir Walter Scott's Antiquary,' and come to the description of the green room at Monkbarns, amongst which the novelist has, with such exquisite cunning of art, imbedded the fresh and glittering verses of the summer poet Chaucer."
The future poet was educated at Marlborough, and, unlike most Marlburians, seems to have left his school without regret. Thence he went up to Oxford, and matriculated at Exeter College on the same day as Sir E. Burne-Jones, with whom his life's work as an artist is so closely associated. Both of them felt a profound enthusiasm for the art and literature of
the Middle Ages, and in Dante Rossetti they recognised "the truest exponent living of their own high ideal." Content with a B.A. degree, Morris left Oxford in 1856. His Pre- raphaelite friends and teachers, the men for whom in those days he had the warmest admiration, were painters ; but the gifts which Morris was soon, to develop were not confined to one art. He was a poet, an architect, a designer, a manufac- turer, and showed in many ways how life may be made more beautiful, and at the same time more simple. His first volume of poems was published in 1858, and the "Defence of Guenevere " announced to an elect few the advent of a new poet. Ten years followed, and then the first portion of "The Earthly Paradise" appeared. The critics, Mr. Valiance observes, contrast the rugged manliness of the earlier poems with "the abject repugnance at the prospect of death" that marks the later work. He points out that the alteration, if any, was one not of mind, but of mood ; and that if the poet "alludes frequently to the subject of death it is as a medimval writer might have done." And Mr. Valiance adds :— "The rank and file of Christendom being =beguiled by the snares of princely place and sham classical culture, from the beginning of the Gospel era down to the close of the Middle Ages, were haunted by no unwholesome nor inordinate dread of
death, but faced it calmly and with fortitude And this their spirit is little different from that which animated the author of The Earthly Paradise,' a true media:mal poet, though one born, he is constrained to own, out of his due time. No more than they did William Morris shrink from the mention of dis- solution."
Mr. Valiance has, we think, missed the point of the criticisms to which he alludes in this passage. It is not the frequent allusions to death amidst the loveliest scenes in the Earthly Paradise that lessens their charm, but the belief so often expressed or implied that there is no sure hope of anything beyond death. Morris was a man of strong convictions and untiring energy, but there is little evidence in his strenuous efforts to reconstruct society that he cared for anything beyond the present life. The author, who is, we believe, a Socialist, devotes a long chapter to this phase of Morris's life and work. The evils associated with civilisation led the poet to think that the whole structure of society rested on a false basis, and with the energy born of a strong faith he advocated schemes which, in the judgment of most Englishmen, can only be realised in Utopia. But it is impossible not to respect a man who strove at no trifling sacrifice to carry out his ideal :— The position," says Mr. Valiance, "Morris took up wiP regard to these matters was very far removed from being that of a mere onlooker, or extern prompter. He was not the man to shirk the responsibility and the consequences of his own acts, to sit at home in comfortable security, and leave it to others to bear the rough brunt of the campaign he himself was helping to instigate. From the first he plunged into the thick of the agita- tion. He sold Socialist literature in public, he spoke at street corners, he marched in procession along with the most rampant of malcontents, he braved imprisonment in support of the cause. Twice he actually became embroiled to the extent of arraignment in the police court For a man of Morris's temperament ' the agonies of nervous discomfort and apprehension entailed by experiences of this sort cannot easily be overrated."
Whatever Morris did he did with his might, and for many years there was probably no harder worker in the Kingdom.
And the variety of his occupations made this activity delightful. He said once he thought he should die of despair if denied his daily work. For twenty-five years and to the day of his death he rented Kelmscott Manor, "the loveliest haunt of ancient peace," Rossetti wrote to his mother, "that can well be imagined The garden is a perfect paradise, and the whole is built on the very banks of the Thames, along which there are beautiful walks for miles." There in his latter years the poet established his famous Press, about which Mr. Valiance has much to tell, and in a house at Hammersmith named after this country home he died. Several attractive subjects are brought forward in this volume that must be passed by without com-
ment. They show what a many-sided man William Morris was, and how, which is so rarely the case, there was scarcely one of his numerous undertakings in which he did not achieve success. The work is one to admire as well as to read, and does infinite credit to all concerned in its publication.
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