Complete works of willia.., p.783
Complete Works of William Morris, page 783
A letter to Burne-Jones, dated “In bed, Red House,” and written in a very shaky hand, towards the end of November, when he was beginning to recover from the rheumatic fever, shows how deep the disappointment was at having to give up the plan of a joint home, even before the necessity of leaving Red House himself had been forced on him.
“As to our palace of art, I confess your letter was a blow to me at first, though hardly an unexpected one: in short I cried, but I have got over it now; of course I see it from your point of view but I like the idea of not giving it up for good even if it is delusive. But now I am only thirty years old; I shan’t always have the rheumatism, and we shall have lots of jolly years of invention and lustre plates together I hope. I have been resting and thinking of what you are to do: I really think you must take some sort of house in London — unless indeed you might think of living a little way out and sharing a studio in town: Stanhope and I might join in this you know. There is only one other thing I can think of, which is when you come back from Hastings come and stay with me for a month or two, there is plenty of room for everybody and everything: you can do your work quietly and uninterruptedly; I shall have a good horse by then and Georgie and I will be able to drive about, meantime you need not be hurried in taking your new crib. I would give £5 to see you old chap; wouldn’t it be safe for you to come down here one day before you go to Hastings?”
At the end of the year the Burne-Joneses removed to Kensington, where they lived for the next three years. The giving up of Red House was fast becoming a settled thing, and it only remained to find a new home in London. It was finally found in one of the old houses in Queen Square, Bloomsbury. The house, with its yard and outbuildings behind, was large enough to serve for both living place and workshops. It was taken on lease from Midsummer, 1865, and thither, in the autumn, the business of Morris & Company was transferred from Red Lion Square, and the Morrises themselves removed from Upton in November. Red House was sold, together with such portions of its furniture and decorations as were either unremovable or too cumbrous to transfer to a house for which they had not been designed. Among the treasures thus abandoned were the whole of the tempera paintings executed on the walls, the magnificent sideboard which Webb had designed for the dining-room, and both the great painted cupboards; but the painted panels in one of these last were taken out and replaced by plain panels. There is still enough of its original decoration left at Red House to make it unique on that account alone. After he left it that autumn, Morris never set eyes on it again, confessing that the sight of it would be more than he could bear.
If emotion recollected in tranquillity were a working definition of poetry, it is in these five years, so busily tranquil after as long a period of stormy emotion, that one might expert to find poetical production the most copious. But the facts are quite the reverse. The latest poems printed in “The Defence of Guenevere” show the author in the full current of imaginative growth, reaching from manner to manner and just on the point (so one might fancy) of mastering a mixed lyrical and dramatic method capable of the most radiant and astonishing effects. For one reason or another, these beginnings were not destined to bear their natural fruit. The cycle of poems from the Trojan War, which had been planned and begun about that time, was fragmentarily continued at Red House, but remained unfinished and was soon wholly laid aside. When he began to write again, after he resumed life in London, the dramatic method was abandoned, and he reappeared to the world, not as a writer of lyrical romances, but as the author of long continuous narrative poems, of which the type was set and the fame assured by the single one first published, “The Life and Death of Jason.”
Of the twelve poems which were to make up the Trojan cycle, only six were ever completed; there are imperfect drafts of two more, and of the remaining four no trace is extant. But the full list of the titles is noted down by Morris himself in a manuscript book probably dating from 1857, on a page following a fragment of the unfinished and unpublished “Maying of Guenevere.” It is as follows, under the general heading of “Scenes from the Fall of Troy” :
Helen Arming Paris.
The Defiance of the Greeks.
Hector’s Last Battle.
Hector brought Dead to Troy.
Helen’s Chamber.
Achilles’ Love-Letter.
The Wedding of Polyxena.
The last Fight before Troy.
The Wooden Horse.
The Descent from the Wooden Horse.
Helen and Menelaus.
Æneas on Shipboard.
The completed scenes run to about 200 lines each in length, and the whole poem, therefore, would have been of about the bulk of a five-act play.
The story of the Trojan War is one which has for all story lovers the greatest and most abiding fascination; and its strange ending, the events that happened after the Iliad, was the part of the story which attracted Morris the most. In itself that part of the story is full of remarkably picturesque and romantic incident, which breaks out even in the dull records of Greek mythographers, Ælian and Philostratus, or in the arguments of the lost epics of the Cycle — the Æthiopiad, the Little Iliad, the Taking of Troy. It was these events which excited the imagination of the Middle Ages most; and it was in the same mediæval and romantic spirit that Morris saw and felt the whole story. He did so by instinct, long before he knew of Caxton’s “Historyes of Troye,” or of the vast body of mediaeval romances that may be traced back to Benoît de Sainte-More and Guido delle Colonne. But when he came to know these he found them just what he meant and what he wanted; and to the last he pleased himself by fancying some thread of real tradition which had filtered down alongside of the regular literary channels of the Greek epic, and reappeared, after the lapse of many centuries, in Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis.
“To-day,” Sir Edward Burne-Jones writes in a letter of thirty years afterwards, “to breakfast came Morris, and we talked hard all morning, mainly of one subject, why the mediæval world was always on the side of the Trojans, and of Quintus Smyrnæus, and how Penthesilea came to be tenderly dealt with in ancient tales and tapestries. He was quite happy.”
Troy is to his imagination a town exactly like Bruges or Chartres: spired and gabled, red-roofed, filled (like the city of King Æetes in “The Life and Death of Jason”) with towers and swinging bells. The Trojan princes go out, like knights in Froissart, to tilt at the barriers, and look down from their walls on
Our great wet ditches, where the carp and tench,
In spite of arblasts and petrariæ,
Suck at the floating lilies all day long.But over the city broods a strange and almost a spectral stillness, an atmosphere like that of a sultry afternoon, darkening to thunder. None of his poems, earlier or later, are more steeped in sadness. All the fierce joy of the war has long gone by; it drags wearily on towards its inevitable close.
Yea, they fought well, and ever, like a man
That hangs legs off the ground by both his hands
Over some great height, did they struggle sore,
Quite sure to slip at last; wherefore, take note
How almost all men, reading that sad siege,
Hold for the Trojans; as I did at least,
Thought Hector the best knight a long way —
So he had already written in his first volume, and the tone in these Troy poems is precisely the same. But here we only catch a last glimpse of Hector as he goes bravely to meet his fate, and with him all the sunlight seems to fade off Troy. The struggle becomes cruel and base on both sides. Paris arms himself again, but like a man in a nightmare.
Yea, like some man am I that lies and dreams
That he is dead, and turning round to wake
Is slain at once without a cry for help.
In what must be the most dolorous arming-song ever written he bids Helen a weary farewell. The lyric, in an altered shape and setting, is well known: recast, and with its sadness turned into a pensive tenderness, it occurs in the tale of “Ogier the Dane,” as a song which Ogier hears sung early on a May morning by two young lovers. This is its original form:
Love, within the hawthorn brake
Pray you be merry for my sake,
While I last, for who knoweth
How near I may be my death?
Sweet, be long in growing old!
Life and love in age grow cold;
Hold fast to life, for who knoweth
What thing cometh after death?
Trouble must be kept afar,
Therefore go I to the war :
Less trouble is there among spears
Than with hard words about your ears.
Love me then, my sweet and fair,
And curse the folk that drive me there.
Kiss me, sweet, for who knoweth
What thing cometh after death?
Even in the Greek camp there is the same weariness and bitter languor. The homes they have left grow dim and strange:
Within the cedar presses the gold fades
Upon the garments they were wont to wear;
Red poppies grow now where their apple trees
Began to redden in late summer days.
Wheat grows upon their water-meadows now,
And wains pass over where the water ran.
This feeling culminates in a weird lyric sung by Hecuba, while still Queen in Troy, and plotting with Paris the murder of Achilles in the temple to which he is to be lured by the forged letter of Polyxena. “Ah, times are changed, the merry days are gone,” has been the recurrent burden of her long speech to Paris; and then all at once she breaks into strange ballad music:
Yea, in the merry days of old
The sailors all grew overbold.
Whereof should days remembered be
That brought bitter ill to me?
Days agone I wore but gold,
Like a light town across the wold
Seen by the stars, I shone out bright;
Many a slave was mine of right.
Ah, but in the days of old
The sea-kings were waxen bold;
The yellow sands ran red with blood,
The towns burned up, both brick and wood;
In their long ship they carried me
And set me down by a strange sea;
None of the gods remembered me.
Ah, in the merry days of old
My garments were all made of gold:
Now have I but one poor gown,
Woven of black wool and brown.
I draw water from the well;
I bind wood that the men fell;
Whoso willeth smiteth me,
An old woman by the sea.
In the scenes of the last night of Troy, as they are given in “The Descent from the Wooden Horse” and “Helen and Menelaus,” this effect of weird breathlessness rises to a height that is almost overwhelming. That the Greek captains in the wooden horse should be wrought up to the highest pitch of nervous tension is indeed no modernism; it was clearly before the minds of the Greek ballad-singers three thousand years ago. But the strange story, preserved in the Odyssey, of Helen singing round the horse, is used here with extraordinary effect. As they lie crowded in the darkness a voice is heard singing from without —
O my merchants, whence come ye
Landing laden from the sea?
— Behold, we come from Sicily :
Corn and wine and oil have we,
Blue cloths and cloths of red.
— Merry merchants, when you are dead
We shall gain that you have lorn :
Out-merchants from the sea,
Your graves are not in Sicily.
The corn for me, the wine for thee,
The blue and the red for our ladies free.
So singing, the voice passes away. The night is dark, rainy, and windless, as they slip out of the horse and take their plotted ways. Menelaus leaves the rest, and, all alone, goes straight to the house of Deiphobus.
There, in a dimly lighted chamber, Helen cannot sleep. Deiphobus, her new husband, lies sunk in the first undisturbed repose that the Trojan princes had taken since the ten years’ war began, his sword hung above the bed. But she wanders through the room restlessly, wondering if she is growing old.
Three hours after midnight, I should think,
And I hear nothing but the quiet rain.
The Greeks are gone, think now, the Greeks are gone.
Henceforward a new life of quiet days
In this old town of Troy is now for me,
And I shall note it as it goeth past
Quietly as the rain does, day by day,
Eld creeping on me. Shall I live sometimes
In these old days whereof this is the last?
Yea shall I live sometimes with sweet Paris
In that old happiness twixt mirth and tears?
The fitting on of arms and going forth,
The dreadful quiet sitting while they fought,
The kissing when he came back to my arms,
And all that I remember like a tale!
Thus musing to herself, she opens the window and thrusts out her bare arm into the cool wet darkness. There is a rustle in the room behind her. Before she can turn she is in the grasp of a mail-clad man, and hears the fierce whisper of her first husband. All her strength collapses in a moment. As in a trance, she dumbly obeys his order to lean over the bed and reach down Deiphobus’s sword, and to hold down his feet while Menelaus thrusts him through. Menelaus drags the bloody corpse out on to the floor and takes its place himself.
I am the Menelaus that you knew
Come back to fetch a thing I left behind.
You think me changed: it is ten years ago,
And many weary things have happened since.
Behold me lying in my own place now:
Abed, Helen, before the night goes by!
But on the horror of this moment there breaks a great and mingled clamour from without, the roar of the taken city. A struggling mob of Greeks and Trojans sweep by. Menelaus and Helen go to the window; a Trojan sees the hated beautiful face in the glimmer of flaming houses, and shoots at her; the arrow just misses, and sings through the window-hole. Pyrrhus, still dripping with the blood of Priam, and after him Teucer, fresh from the outrage of Ajax on Cassandra, successively appear. In the middle of their story a cry is raised that the Trojans are making afresh stand: and all hurry off amid a growing tumult of shouting as dawn begins to glimmer, ending in a long shrill cry of the rallied Trojans,
“Æneas and Antenor to the ships!”Between this vivid and startling dramatic method, and the equable sweetness of the later manner as it appears in its first perfection in “The Life and Death of Jason,” the interval is great indeed; nor can it be matter of wonder that the transition took place through a period of silence. But there is more in it than that. Hitherto the poetry has been, alike in its beauties and in its defects, immature. When it is resumed, it is in a manner, and of a substance, deliberately chosen; we hear in it what we may like or dislike, may regard with admiration or with indifference, what appeals to various minds variously; but it is the serious voice of the grown man.
CHAPTER VI. THE EARTHLY PARADISE. 1865-1870
QUEEN SQUARE, in which Morris himself and the firm of Morris & Company took up house together in the autumn of 1865, is a backwater of older Bloomsbury, which then retained some traces of its original dignity as a suburb of the London of Queen Anne. Put out of fashion half a century before by the more modern splendours of Russell Square, it had lingered on as a residential neighbourhood; and the famous girls’ school established in it about the middle of last century, and commonly known as “the ladies’ Eton,” had only been finally closed during the Crimean War. The residential was now becoming mingled with an industrial element. The house on the east side, No. 26, taken by Morris, and the headquarters of his work for the next seventeen years, has disappeared to make room for an extension of the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic. The ground floor was turned into an office and show-room. A large ball-room which had been built at the end of the yard, and connected with the dwelling-house by a wooden gallery, was turned into a principal workshop. There was room for other workshops in the small court at the back, and further accommodation was found when needed in Ormond Yard close by.
With Morris now continuously on the spot, the company became little more than a name as far as regarded the direction and management of the business. Rossetti had never taken much concern in the work. After his wife’s death he had been for a long time almost a recluse: now he was living in Chelsea, at the other end of London, and was wholly absorbed in his painting. Faulkner, who had no productive gift, and whose great mathematical ability was somewhat thrown away on keeping the books of the firm, had returned to work in Oxford the year before; but in his vacations he stayed much with his mother and sisters, who had a house in Queen Square a few doors off, and at these times his intercourse with Morris was constant and his share in the conduct of the business not inconsiderable. Marshall had resumed his own line of work. Burne-Jones and Madox Brown continued to supply designs for stained glass, and Webb for furniture. But the whole of the production, and, except in glass and furniture, practically the whole of the design was now in Morris’ sole hands. All the kinds of work begun at Red Lion Square went on here: and gradually there began to be added other industries which afterwards became the staple production of the firm — weaving, dyeing, and printing on cloth. No long time after Red House was given up, it became possible to have supplied it from the works at Queen Square with almost everything necessary to complete its decoration and furnishing. Such is the irony of human affairs.
