except in a healthy society. This view of art was not a mere theory for him; it came to him through his own experience and he made a theory of it because his reason confirmed his instinct. He began by loving all Gothic art because of its noble submission to architecture; and he could not feel the same love for the art of the Renaissance when it became independent of architecture. There was egotism in it that displeased him and which seemed to him, when he came to think about it, a symptom of all the egotistical heresies of the modern world. With all his passion for art he was not inclined to glorify the artist or to conceive of him as a superman producing masterpieces in his lonely pride. He thought of him rather as a workman who gave more than was asked of him from love of his work. He knew well enough, of course, that Michelangelo and Velasquez were great men; but he judged the art of an age rather by its cottages and its cups and saucers than by its great pictures, as he judged the prosperity of a state by the condition of its poor rather than of its rich.
Thus it was certain that Rossetti would not remain master of his mind; but for the moment Morris obeyed him with the joy of one for whom all the problems of life are made easy by absolute obedience. He took rooms with Burne-Jones at 17, Red Lion Square, where Rossetti had lived before; and there they lived together a life about which many stories are told, working and playing with equal vigor and always under the spell of Rossetti. Yet already Morris began to do something on his own account which showed the natural bent of his mind. Their rooms were to be furnished and Morris could not find in any shop a single new table or chair that he could endure. This was not mere fastidiousness. To him vulgarity in furniture was, like vulgarity of manners, the expression of a wrong state of mind; and if his own furniture had been vulgar, he would have felt responsible for it as for his own manners. Therefore he designed furniture to please himself, making drawings that were carried out by a carpenter. Thus simply and naturally he began his business of “poetic upholsterer.” Not being able to get what he wanted from the minds of others, he got it from his own. This was his way all his life and the reason why he practiced so many arts in turn. He found them all either dead or corrupted; and, instead of complaining that the times were out of joint, he did what he could to set them right. From the first he was not only an artist, but one who tried to make the world what he wished it to be; beginning with armchairs he ended with society.
In the summer of 1857 Rossetti conceived the project of painting the new Debating Hall of the Oxford Union and obtained leave to do so with the help of other artists of his own choosing. There were to be ten paintings in tempera, all of subjects from the Morte d’Arthur; and the ceiling above them was to be decorated. Returning to London he told Burne-Jones and Morris that they were to start on the work at once. Other artists chosen were Arthur Hughes, Spencer-Stanhope, Val Prinsep and John Hungerford Pollen, all young men who would do whatever Rossetti commanded. None of them knew anything about mural painting, and some were only painters because Rossetti had ordered them to paint. The new walls were damp and not prepared in any way to receive colour; but no one had any misgivings. Morris, of course, would much rather paint a wall than a canvas; and he was in Oxford and had begun his picture before the others had made their designs. His subject was “How Sir Palomydes loved la Belle Iseult with exceeding great love out of measure”. He filled the foreground with flowers, and Rossetti, who chaffed him as much as he admired him, suggested that he should fill the foreground of another picture with scarlet runners. Perhaps Morris remembered Blake’s poem, “O Sunflower, weary of time”, with its “youth pined away with desire.” At any rate this was the beginning of the sunflower’s artistic career; and Morris himself, no doubt, was heartily sick of it as an æsthetic symbol twenty-five years later. He was the first to finish as he had been to begin; and at once set to work to paint the roof. In this his old Oxford friends Faulkner and Dixon helped him. For Rossetti believed that any one, when he liked, could paint, and indeed he could communicate talent to his disciples, as a great general can communicate courage to his soldiers. The roof was finished in November; but Rossetti’s painting, Lancelot’s Vision of the Sangrail, was never finished. To judge from the drawing it must have been the finest work he ever did; but it and all the other paintings soon moldered away, and less remains of them now than of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Morris redecorated the roof in 1875.
30. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, The Pilgrim Outside the Garden of Love, c. 1893–1898. Detail from embroidered frieze The Romaunt of the Rose, 155.9 × 306.7 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
31. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., Moon Room panel from the Green Dining Room, 1863. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
The failure of this spirited adventure must have made Morris feel the contrast between the science and organisation of the great ages of art and the ignorance and indiscipline of his own time. All Rossetti’s genius and leadership were wasted upon the walls of the Union because he knew nothing of the craft of wall painting. Morris learnt himself, and taught others, to regard every art as a craft with technical secrets that must be learnt before it could be well practiced. And already he was teaching himself the secrets of craft after craft.
“In all illumination and work of that kind, Rossetti said of him, he is quite unrivalled by anything modern that I know.” Illuminating was never an archaistic fad for him, but an exercise of his talent more natural than picture painting. How natural, we can see from a verse which he wrote long afterwards lamenting how all the arts of the world were unknown to the poor of great towns.
The singers have sung and the builders have built,
The painters have fashioned their tales of delight;
For what and for whom hath the world’s book been gilded,
When all is for these but the blackness of night?
But the painting at the Oxford Union must also have given him a taste of the delights of a great age of art, the heightened powers of companionship, the happy rivalry free from the rancor and cares of competition. There were wonderful evenings after their work, Rossetti still predominating; and among the undergraduates who visited them was the poet Algernon Swinburne of Balliol. Val Prinsep told of his first dinner with Rossetti, where he was introduced to Morris who spoke little. After dinner Rossetti said to Morris, “Top, read us one of your grinds.” Morris refused at first, but Rossetti insisted; and, says Prinsep:
“The effect produced on my mind was so strong that to this day, forty years after, I can still recall the scene. Rossetti on the sofa, with large melancholy eyes fixed on Morris, the poet at the table reading and ever fidgeting with his watch-chain, and Burne-Jones working at a pen-and-ink drawing:
‘Gold on her hair and gold on her feet,
And gold where the hems of her kirtle meet,
And a golden girdle round my sweet,
Ah! Qu’elle est belle La Marguerite,’
still seems to haunt me, and this other stanza:
‘Swerve to the left, son Roger,’ he said,
When you catch his eyes through the helmet slit.
Swerve to the left, then out at his head,
And the Lord God give you joy of it.’
I confess I returned to the Mitre with my brain in a whirl.”
These verses are from two poems, the Eve of Crecy and The Judgment of God, both of which were printed in the volume called the Defence of Guenevere and other Poems, which Morris published early in 1858.
32. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., Elderflowers Room panel from the Green Dining Room, 1863.
Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
