Page images
PDF
EPUB

"How can it be that strong and fruitful life Hath ceased, that strenuous but joyful heart, That craftsman in the loom of song and art, That voice by beating seas of hope and strife To lift the soul of labour from the knife, Who strove 'gainst greed of factory and mart. Ah! ere the morning must he, too, depart, TOTHING can be more unjust than the accusation

N

frequently levelled against this age by men of commonplace minds who can see nothing in contemporary life, society, and literature but what is dull, stale, flat and unprofitable. "How mediocre everything is," they cry; "how monotonous the dead level of the commonplace! Where are now the picturesque personalities, the men of commanding character, the heroes and heroines who embody in their own career all the elements of romance?" So they said, and so they moan and mutter, doing their puny best to reduce the world, and all the men and women in it, to their own dreary level. To compare great things to small, we may apply to them Coleridge's famous lines concerning the owlet Atheism :

Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place (Portentous sight) the owlet Atheism,

Sailing on obscene wings.athwart the noon,

Drops his blue-fringed lids,

and holds them close,

And, hooting at the glorious Sun in Heaven,

Cries out, "Where is it?"

Much nearer the truth was the remark made to me by a distinguished Canadian, who exclaimed, "I never come to your city without feeling what a

While yet with battle-cries the air is rife!
Blazon his name in England's book of gold,
Who loved her and who wrought her legends fair
Woven in song and written in design,

The wonders of the press and loom, a shrine
Beyond death's chilling hand, that shall unfold

In life's house beautiful a spirit rare."-WALTER CRANE. with us, having closed his eyes in death on the same day on which his last book was given to the world -we have a personality that may be compared without fear to almost any of those of the brilliant throng which

surrounded the Court of the Virgin Queen.

William Morris had almost every quality possessed by the Elizabethans, with this difference, which is not to his disadvantage: that instead of regarding his art, whether of decoration or of song, as a talent to be used for the entertainment of the few, he placed it at the disposition of all his countrymen.

[graphic]

The last letter I had from him was a brief line giving me full and free permission to issue as one of the Penny Poets a descriptive analysis with copious extracts from the pages of "The Earthly Paradise." As for his taste in decorative design, he devoted himself steadily to diffuse among the homes of the English of his day some conception of beauty and design and taste in 'mural decoration. Three hundred years ago he would probably have been. retained to ornament a palace or a castle, but today he brought the lamp of beauty and the light of taste into the homes of myriads of ordinary men and women who do not inhabit palaces, but who have learnt from him to appreciate beauty of form and colour in their domestic surroundings.

WILLIAM MORRIS.

(From a photograph by Hollyer.)

privilege it is to live in these times and in this place. All the incidents of every life, all the personages whom you meet, are as interesting and romantic as anything that you read of in the pages of history." There is good reason to believe that three hundred years hence our descendants, looking back upon the age of Victoria through the mist of tradition, and after a sufficient length of time to enable the great amongst us to be seen in their true proportions among the crowd that jostled them in the street, will think it vies in all the elements of greatness with that of Elizabeth. It is true we have no Shakespeare, but the world has only had one Shakespeare, and he was not for an age but for all time. In every other respect, we of the Victorian age have little reason to envy the lot of our ancestors of the sixteenth century. All of which exordium is intended to lead up to the remark that in William Morris-who, alas! is no longer

It may sound absurd to those who take the most superficial view of things to compare Morris, "the wallpaper man," with the fashionable exquisites who sunned themselves in the radiance of Elizabeth's Court; but those who knew the man as he was, and who appreciated the great ideals which ever impelled him to dedicate his whole life to the service of art and the people, will agree with me in thinking that the comparison between the "wall-paper man" and the Euphuists and artists of the Elizabethan age is not by any means to the disadvantage of William Morris.

It is only now, when he has gone from amongst us, that we realise how much he counted for in our modern civilisation. He was never, as he described

himself, an empty singer of an idle day," but ever an inspired soul, full of an ambition which denied him rest-an ambition, not for himself alone or chiefly, or indeed at all, but a desire to unite together the two great objects of his devotion, Art and the People. Those whom God had joined let not man put asunder, and as man had severed them far apart, he addressed himself with all the means at the disposal of a singularly gifted mind and winning character to bring them together again. There was a unity in his life that was beautiful to behold, a light which shone through as many facets as those of a diamond, but which was nevertheless one light. Whether he was writing poetry, or staining wall-papers, or taking part in Socialist agitations, or composing novels, or reviving the lost art of splendid bookbinding, he was ever on the war-path, ever consumed by the one desire to make life once more beautiful, not merely for the gifted and wealthy few, but for the innumerable many. Here indeed was an ambition worthy of the immortal gods; here was a quest as great and as noble as any that figured in the romance of the Table Round, or Spenser's "Faery Queen." To bring back beauty to the everyday life of common men and women; to exorcise ugliness, filth, and squalor, and all the hideous meanness of life; to do that by all and every means, using every kind of weapon which he could win or grasp, this was William Morris's life.

It was a life lived for the redemption of the raceredemption and regeneration interpreted, no doubt, in a non-theological sense, but none the less for all that, a real redemption and a real regeneration. It was this which made him a Socialist. He was no scientific thinker, like Karl Marx; he was a dreamer of ennobling dreams, and his Socialism was more of a whole-souled protest against the existing order of things which had its natural fruitage in the filth and squalor of our modern life, than any distinct attempt at the reconstruction of society. In his "News from Nowhere," which I reviewed at some length in the REVIEW OF REVIEWS for May, 1891, we have a poet's vision of an anarchical millennium. For Morris, instead of regarding Socialism as the conversion of the world into one gigantic prisonhouse, in which all men receive equal rations as the price for consenting to equal servitude, dreamed ever of an ideal Commonwealth, in which law was not and punishment was unknown,

He expressly says that crime springs from property, and with the abolition of property all crime will vanish. In a society where there is no punishment to evade, no law to triumph over, remorse will certainly follow transgression. In his Utopia there were to be no law courts, no government, no politics, Parliament House was to be conformed into a dung market, and so forth and so forth, after the fashion of an idealist who takes little heed of the iron laws that rule the affairs of man.

It was his sympathy with liberty, his hatred of police tyranny, and his whole-souled devotion to the cause of the people which first brought me into personal contact with the man who stained his wall-papers with poetry, and made the melodiousness of his verse the murmurous music of a myriad homes.

In his "News from Nowhere" he has a terrible picture of the massacre of Trafalgar Square. You can see in every line of it the memory of that horrid time when Sir Charles Warren reigned at Scotland Yard and Mr. Matthews was at the Home Office. Mr. Morris was one of the committee which had charge of the agitation for vindicating the popular rights to meet in the Square. He subscribed to its funds and attended its committee meetings, sitting for the most part silent, but always attentive.

Of the many conversations that went on at those times I do not recollect any save one. Things were mueh more strained then than even those who went through it can very well recollect to-day; but those who saw the cavalry called out to clear the Square on the memorable afternoon of "Bloody Sunday" had to discuss many things which ought never to have been within range of possibility in modern England. At one time it was reported that Sir Charles Warren intended to defend the Square with machine guns, and there was a question, supposing the troops opened fire upon the crowd, from what point would they fire? I well remember William Morris's look of horror at the remark which I let drop, that it was at any rate well there were no houses, only the National Gallery, behind the Square, in case they fired from Charles Stuart's statue. ." Only the National Gallery!" he said with a shudder; and although nothing more was said, I felt the cold shudder of the art st to whom the treasures of ancient and modera art stored in the National Gallery were far more precious even than human lives. I never knew exactly whether Mr. Morris had anything to do with another phase of that agitation, which consisted in sending the unemployed in batches to the National Gallery on free days as a means of at once keeping them warm and giving them an opportunity of inspecting the pictures of the nation.

1

William Morris went through the whole of that time quietly, but resolutely taking part in all that was done. After that I saw but little of him, and our paths lay far apart; but the fact that he livel, that he was writing, and dreaming, and lecturing, and working at Hammersmith and at Kelmscott, was like a thread of bright colour worked through the warp and woof of contemporary life. Quiet, unassuming, steadfast in season and out of season, devoted with his whole soul to his particular work in life, his death removed one of the typical Englishmen of the nineteenth century—one of those knights of modern times who are ever in the saddle, riding restlessly to and fro in quest of their Holy Grail.

The vision which sustained him may not have been as exalted as that which enabled saints and martyrs of olden time to go rejoicing to the stake, but, such as it was, he believed in it firmly and lived for it wholly England to him to-day was, as he said, a country of hideous and foul workshops and fouler gambling dens, surrounded by an ill-kept and poverty-stricken farm, pillaged by the masters of the workshops. Eugland as he hoped in time it might be made was to be a garden, where nothing was wasted and nothing spoilt, with the necessary dwellings and sheds and workshops scattered

up and down the country, all trim and neat and pretty. To realise that, to bring about the Garden-England of the future. bright with the roses and sunshine of June, he devoted all the energies of his manhood. In that Garden-England, where life was very pleasant, he passed his ideal existence, but from it he continually emerged, as he advised the hero in his "News from Nowhere." to "strive with whatever pain and labour needs must be to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, rest and happiness."

EULOGY BY A FRIEND.

In the Fortnightly Review for November, Mr. Mackenzie Bell contributes what the editor describes as a eulogy of the poet and decorator. Mr. Bell was a friend of William Morris, as well as a worshipping disciple. He says:

THE MAN AND HIS IDEA.

In William Morris we have lost a poet of supreme excellence;

the man as he used to find him at work in his own study:

His eyes were blue-grey in tint, and in repose they might be described as meditative, not, however, even then, without a something in their glance that betokened the boundless energy of the man. But when his face was absolutely still one noticed rather the loftv uprightness of the brow than the eyes. What impressed me most about William Morris (who granted me the honour of personal intercourse with him in his later years) was an indescribable sense of power, arising in part, I fancy, because of his commanding presence. Occasionally there was an aspect almost of sternness about his face when at rest- an aspect caused in part by the great strength of will apparent in the set of the lower jaw and in the compressed lips.

HIS POETIC RANK AND PERSONAL CHARACTER.

Speaking of his friend, he says:

Real kindness and good nature were always visible in him, and the irritability sometimes also visible was more the result,

[graphic][subsumed][merged small]

an artist and designer of exquisite skill; a master of English prose whose style is rare in its delicacy, rich in its beauty; a scholar who had more learning of the dry-as-dust kind than many whose sole claim to celebrity arises from this source, and who, in addition, brought to his scholarly work a luminous imagination of the first order; an ever active worker, whom all who really understood him (whether they agree with his views or not) must admit to have had pure, lofty aims and ennobling purposes. The underlying unity of his career was his quest of the beautiful, and this was at the root of his Socialism.

THE MAN AS HE LIVED.

Mr. Bell had not the privilege of Mr. Morris's acquaintance when he was in the prime of life, at the time, for instance, when his portrait was painted by Mr. Watts. Mr. Bell truly says:

For it is fortunate that our greatest living painter should have produced as one of his masterpieces the likeness of one of the most deeply interesting personalities that our century has brought forth.

He does not make much effort to draw a portrait of Morris in black and white, but he gives us a glimpse of

I used to think, of his marvellous energy and his consequent resulting impatience of control, stupidity, or slowness, than sharp temper. To a man of his quick and ever-alert intelligence and wholesome freedom from many silly conventions, the prejudices and inanities of ordinary people must have appeared more than usually silly. Fully conscious of his own position in English letters, and regarding Mr. Swinburne as his only equal among living poets, he was nevertheless far too considerable a man to be vain in the ordinary acceptation of the term.

Mr. Morris was not much of a success as a lecturer, but he was a brilliant conversationalist, much given to paradox, an artist who valued inspiration much more than the labour necessary to fashion the result of the artistic in. Not but that he was prodigal of labour in all that he did, but it was his exuberant outflow of high potential vitality which distinguished him most from other men.

I finish this by quoting the sentence with which Mr. Bell begins his essay :

By the death of William Morris England has lost her man of greatest genius.

[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed]

THE

HOW IT WAS FOUGHT FROM THE AMERICAN "REVIEW OF REVIEWS."

THE Review of Reviews of New York converted its November number into what may be regarded as an almost encyclopædic survey of the Presidential Campaign. Its articles, written from an independent standpoint, and supplemented by contributions from leading representatives of both parties, give the reader the best account of the great electoral battle that has yet been published. It is refreshing, in the midst of the heated wranglings of angry disputants, to find one editor who can write as cheerily and as sensibly as Dr. Shaw discourses on the great struggle.

[merged small][merged small][graphic][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed]

"THE SILVER DOG WITH THE GOLDEN TAIL"-AND THE TAIL WAGGED THE DOG AFTER ALL.
(A campaign poster much used in the West. The numerals indicate the electoral vote of each state.)

both sides who have shouted themselves hoarse declaring that their opponents are thieves, whose success would mean the ruin of the country:

A CHEERY ESTIMATE.

In justice to the most representative portion of the country, it should be said that the one set of pessimists will chiefly be found east of the Alleghany mountains, and the other set, almost to a man, west of the Missouri river. In the central section, extending from Pennsylvania to Nebraska, the political battle has been raging most lustily; but men are not pessimists in that region. In those splendid commonwealths of normal and wholesome development, of high average prosperity, and of comparative freedom from extreme contrasts of social condition, the people are not given to supposing, even under the excitement of a presidential compaign, that their country is going to the dogs or that half their fellow-citizens are rascals.

If ever there was a period when political conditions in the United States did not justify pessimism on moral grounds, that time is this present year 1896. Never before has so

said. But the observer who is capable of a large view of the contest must have been struck with the fact that the fight this year has been a remarkably fair one.

AN ASTONISHING SPECTACLE.

The National Campaign Committee has understood the situation with a very clear intelligence. That committee very wisely decided to make Chicago its headquarters, and also decided at the very outset that its campaign must be one of education rather than agitation, and of friendly persuasion rather than of accusation or calumny. The Republican campaign fund has been a large one this year, but it has been honourably as well as effectively expended. The vast bulk of it has been used for the printing and distribution of pamphlets and leaflets relating to the issues of the campaign, principally to the money question. This reading matter for the most part has been ably prepared and edited, and its distribution has been accomplished upon a scale unheard of heretofore in any. political campaign in the history of the world, and by methods the tactfulness and ingenuity

« PreviousContinue »