Victorian Worthies Part 18

Queen Square, Bloomsbury, was the first scene of his labours; but as the firm prospered and the demands for their work grew, Morris found the premises too small. At one time he had hopes of finding a suitable spot near the old cloth-working towns at the foot of the Cotswolds, where pure air and clear water were to be found; but the conditions of trade made it necessary for him to be nearer to London. In 1881 he bought an old silk-weaving mill at Merton near Wimbledon, on the banks of the Wandle, and this is still the centre of the work.

To study special industries, or to execute a special commission, he was often obliged to make long journeys to the north of England or elsewhere; but the routine of his life consisted in daily travelling between his house at Hammersmith and the mills at Merton, which was more tiresome than it is to-day owing to the absence of direct connexion between these districts. But his energy overbore these obstacles; and, except when illness prevented him, he remained punctual in his attendance to business and in close touch with all his workers. Towards them Morris was habitually generous. The weaker men were kept on and paid by time, long after they had ceased to produce remunerative work, while the more capable were in course of time admitted as profit-sharers into the business. Every man who worked under him had to be prepared for occasional outbursts of impatient temper, when Morris spoke, we are told, rather as a good workman scornful of bad work, than as an employer finding fault with his men; but in the long run all were sure to receive fair and friendly treatment.

Such was William Morris at his Merton works, a master craftsman worthy of the best traditions of the Middle Ages, fit to hold his place with the masons of Chartres, the weavers of Bruges, and the wood-carvers of Nuremberg. As a manager of a modern industrial firm competing with others for profit he was less successful. The purchasing of the best material, the succession of costly experiments, the 'sc.r.a.pping' of all imperfect work, meant a heavy drain on the capital. Also the society had been hurriedly formed without proper safeguards for fairly recompensing the various members according to their work; and when in 1875 it was found necessary to reconst.i.tute it, that Morris might legally hold the position which he had from the outset won by his exertions, this could not be effected without loss, nor without a certain friction between the partners. So, however prosperous the business might seem to be through its monopoly of certain wares, it was difficult even for a skilful financier to make on each year a profit which was in any way proportionate to the fame of the work produced. But in 1865 Morris was fortunate in finding a friend ready to undertake the keeping of the books, who sympathized with his aims and whose gifts supplemented his own; and, for the rest, he had read and digested the work of Ruskin, and had learnt from him that the function of the true merchant was to produce goods of the best quality, and only secondarily to produce a profitable balance-sheet.

How it was that from being the head of an industrial business Morris came to be an ardent advocate of Socialism is the central problem of his life. The root of the matter lay in his love of art and of the Middle Ages. He had studied the centuries productive of the best art known to him, and he believed that he understood the conditions under which it was produced. The one essential was that the workers found pleasure in their work. They were not benumbed by that Division of Labour which set the artisan laboriously repeating the same mechanical task; they worked at the bidding of no master jealously measuring time, material, and price against his compet.i.tors; they pa.s.sed on from one generation to another the tradition of work well done for its own sake. He knew there was another side to the picture, and that in many ways the freedom of the mediaeval craftsman had been curtailed. He did not ask history to run backwards, but he felt that the nineteenth century was advancing on the wrong line of progress. To him there seemed to be three types of social framework. The feudal or Tory type was past and obsolete; for the richer cla.s.ses of to-day had neither the power nor the will to renew it.

The Whig or Manchester ideal held the field, the rich employer regarding his workmen as so many hands capable of producing so much work and so much profit, and believing that free bargaining between free men must yield the best economic results for all cla.s.ses, and that beyond economic and political liberty the State had no more to give, and a man must be left to himself. Against this doctrine emphatic protests had been uttered in widely differing forms by Carlyle and Disraeli, by Ruskin and d.i.c.kens; but it was slow to die.

The third ideal was that of the Socialist; and to Morris this meant that the State should appropriate the means of production and should so arrange that every worker was a.s.sured of the means of livelihood and of sufficient leisure to enjoy the fruits of what he had made. He who could live so simply himself thought more of the unjust distribution of happiness than of wealth, as may be seen in his _News from Nowhere_, where he gives a Utopian picture of England as it was to be after the establishment of Socialism. Here rather than in polemical speeches or pamphlets can we find the true reflection of his att.i.tude and the way in which he thought about reform.

It was not easy for him to embark on such a crusade. In his early manhood, except for his volunteering in the war scare of 1859, he had taken no part in public life. The first cause which led to his appearing at meetings was wrath at the ill-considered restoration of old buildings. In 1877, when a society was formed for their protection, Morris was one of the leaders, and took his stand by Ruskin, who had already stated the principles to be observed. They believed that the presentation of nineteenth-century masonry in the guise of mediaeval work was a fraud on the public, that it obscured the true lessons of the past, and that, under the pretence of reviving the original design, it marred the development which had naturally gone forward through the centuries. It was from his respect for work and the workman that Morris denounced this pedantry, from his love of stones rightly hewn and laid, of carving which the artist had executed unconsciously in the spirit of his time, and which was now being replaced by lifeless imitation to the order of a bookish antiquary. Against this he was ready to protest at all times, and references to meetings of 'Antisc.r.a.pe', as he calls the society, are frequent in his letters. He also was rigid in declining all orders to the firm where his own decorations might seem to disturb the relics of the past.

His next step was still more difficult. The plunge of a famous poet and artist into agitation, of a capitalist and employer into Socialism, provoked much wonder and many indignant protests. His severer critics seized on any pamphlet of his in which they could detect logical fallacies and scornfully asked whether this was fit work for the author of the _Earthly Paradise_. Many liberal-minded people indeed regretted the diversion of his activities, but the question whether he was wasting them is one that needs consideration; and to judge him fairly we must look at the problem from his side and postulate that Socialism (whether he interpreted its theories aright or not) did pursue practical ideals.

If Aeschylus was more proud of fighting at Marathon than of writing tragedies--if Socrates claimed respect as much for his firmness as a juryman as for his philosophic method--surely Morris might believe that his duty to his countrymen called him to leave his study and his workshop to take an active part in public affairs. He might be more p.r.o.ne to error than those who had trained themselves to political life, but he faced the problems honestly and sacrificed his comfort for the common good.

Criticism took a still more personal turn in the hands of those who pointed out that Morris himself occupied the position of a capitalist employer, and who asked him to live up to his creed by divesting himself of his property and taking his place in the ranks of the proletariat.

This argument is dealt with by Mr. Mackail,[54] who describes the steps which Morris took to admit his foremen to sharing the profits of the business, and defends him against the charge of inconsistency. Morris may not have thought out the question in all its aspects, but much of the criticism pa.s.sed upon him was even more illogical and depended on far too narrow and illiterate a use of the word Socialism. He knew as well as his critics that no new millennium could be introduced by merely taking the wealth of the rich and dividing it into equal portions among the poor.

[Note 54: _Life of Morris_, by J. W. Mackail, vol. ii, pp. 133-9.]

However reluctant Morris might be to leave his own work for public agitation, he plunged into the Socialist campaign with characteristic energy. For two or three years he was constantly devoting his Sundays to open-air speech-making, his evenings to thinly-attended meetings in stuffy rooms in all the poorer parts of London; and, at the call of comrades, he often travelled into the provinces, and even as far as Scotland, to lend a hand. And he spent time and money prodigally in supporting journals which were to spread the special doctrines of his form of Socialism. Nor was it only the indifference and the hostility of those outside which he had to meet; quarrels within the party were frequent and bitter, though Morris himself, despite his impetuous temper, showed a wonderful spirit of brotherliness and conciliation. For two years his work lay with the Socialist Democratic Federation, till differences of opinion with Mr. Hyndman drove him to resign; in 1885 he founded the Socialist League, and for this he toiled, writing, speaking, and attending committees, till 1889, when the control was captured by a knot of anarchists, in spite of all his efforts. After this he ceased to be a 'militant'; but in no way did he abandon his principles or despair of the ultimate triumph of the cause. The result of his efforts must remain unknown. If the numbers of his audiences were often insignificant, and the visible outcome discouraging to a degree, yet in estimating the value of personal example no outward test can satisfy us.

He gave of his best with the same thoroughness as in all his crafts, and no man can do more. But, looking at the matter from a regard to his special gifts and to his personal happiness, we may be glad that his active connexion with Socialism ceased in 1889, and that he was granted seven years of peace before the end.

These were the years that saw the birth and growth of the 'Kelmscott'

printing press, so called after his country house. Of illuminated ma.n.u.scripts[55] he had always been fond, but it was only in 1888 that his attention was turned to details of typography. The mere study of old and new founts did not satisfy him for long; the creative impulse demanded that he should design types of his own and produce his own books. As in the other arts, his lifelong friend Burne-Jones was called in to supply figure drawings for the ill.u.s.trated books which Morris was himself to adorn with decorative borders and initials. Of his many schemes, not all came to fruition; but after four years of planning, and a year and a half given to the actual process of printing, his masterpiece, the Kelmscott edition of Chaucer, was completed, and a copy was in his hands a few months before his death.

[Note 55: Mr. Hyndman (_Story of an Adventurous Life_, p. 355) describes a visit to the Bodleian Library at Oxford with Morris, and how 'quickly, carefully, and surely' he dated the illuminated ma.n.u.scripts.]

The last seven years of his life were spent partly at Hammersmith and partly at Kelmscott, the old manor house, lying on the banks of the Upper Thames, which he had tenanted since 1878. He had never been a great traveller, dearly though he loved the north of France with its Gothic cathedrals and 'the river bottoms with the endless poplar forests and the green green meadows'. His tastes were very individual. Iceland made stronger appeals to him than Greece or Rome; and even at Florence and Venice he was longing to return to England and its homely familiar scenes. Scotland with its bare hills, 'raw-boned' as he called it, never gave him much pleasure; for he liked to see the earth clothed by nature and by the hand of man. By the Upper Thames, at the foot of the Cotswolds, the buildings of the past were still generally untouched; and beyond the orchards and gardens, with their old-world look, lay stretches of meadows, diversified by woods and low hills, haunted with the song of birds; and he could believe himself still to be in the England of Chaucer and Shakespeare. There he would always welcome the friends whom he loved and who loved him; but to the world at large he was a recluse. His abrupt manner, his Johnsonian utterances, would have made him a disconcerting element in Victorian tea-parties. When provoked by foolish utterances, he was, no less than Johnson, downright in contradiction. There was nothing that he disliked so much as being lionized; and there was much to annoy him when he stepped outside his own home and circle. His last public speech was made on the abuses of public advertis.e.m.e.nt; and in the last year of his life we hear him growling in Ruskinian fas.h.i.+on that he was ever 'born with a sense of romance and beauty in this accursed age'.

His life had been a strenuous and exhausting one, but he enjoyed it to the last. As he said to Hyndman ten days before the end, 'It has been a jolly good world to me when all is said, and I don't wish to leave it yet awhile'. At least his latter years had been years of peace. He had been freed from the stress of conflict; he had found again the joys of youth, and could recapture the old music.

The days have slain the days, and the seasons have gone by And brought me the summer again; and here on the gra.s.s I lie As erst I lay and was glad, ere I meddled with right and wrong.

After an illness in 1891 he never had quite the same physical vigour, though he continued to employ himself fully for some years in a way which would tax the energy of many robust men. In 1895 the vital energy was failing, and he was content to relax his labours. In August 1896 he was suffering from congestion of the lungs, and in October he died peacefully at Hammersmith, attended by the loving care of his wife and his oldest friends. The funeral at Kelmscott was remarkable for simplicity and beauty, the coffin being borne along the country road in a farm wagon strewn with leaves; and he lies in the quiet churchyard amid the meadows and orchards which he loved so well.

Among the prophets and poets who took up their parable against the wors.h.i.+p of material wealth and comfort, he will always have a foremost place. The thunder of Carlyle, the fiery eloquence of Ruskin, the delicate irony of Matthew Arnold, will find a responsive echo in the heart of one reader or another; will expose the false standards of life set up in a materialistic age and educate them in the pursuit of what is true, what is beautiful, and what is reasonable. But to men who work with their hands there must always be something specially inspiring in the life and example of one who was a handicraftsman and so much beside.

And Morris was not content to denounce and to despair. He enjoyed what was good in the past and the present, and he preached in a hopeful spirit a gospel of yet better things for the future. He was an artist in living. Amid all the diversity of his work there was an essential unity in his life. The men with whom he worked were the friends whom he welcomed in his leisure; the crafts by which he made his wealth were the pastimes over which he talked and thought in his home; his dreams for the future were framed in the setting of the mediaeval romances which he loved from his earliest days. Though he lived often in an atmosphere of conflict, and often knew failure, he has left us an example which may help to fill the emptiness and to kindle the lukewarmness of many an unquiet heart, and may reconcile the discords that mar the lives of too many of his countrymen in this age of transition and of doubt.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN RICHARD GREEN

From a drawing by Frederick Sandys]

JOHN RICHARD GREEN

1837-83

1837. Born at Oxford, December 12.

1845-52. Magdalen College School, Oxford.

1852-4. With a private tutor.

1855-9. Jesus College, Oxford.

1861-3. Curate at Goswell Road, E.C.

1863-4. Curate at Hoxton.

1864-9. Mission Curate and Rector of St. Philip's, Stepney.

1869. Abandons parochial work. Librarian at Lambeth Palace.

1867-73. Contributor to _Sat.u.r.day Review_.

1874. _Short History of the English People_ published.

1877. Marries Miss Alice Stopford.

1877-80. Four volumes of larger _History of the English People_ published.

1880-1. Winter in Egypt.

1882. January, _Making of England_ published.

1883. January, _Conquest of England_ finished (published posthumously).

Last illness. Death, March 7.

JOHN RICHARD GREEN

HISTORIAN

The eighteenth century did some things with a splendour and a completeness which is the despair of later, more restlessly striving generations. Barren though it was of poetry and high imagination, it gave birth to our most famous works in political economy, in biography, and in history; and it has set up for us cla.s.sic models of imperishable fame. But the wisdom of Adam Smith, the shrewd observation of Boswell, the learning of Gibbon, did not readily find their way into the market-place. Outside of the libraries and the booksellers' rows in London and Edinburgh they were in slight demand. Even when the volumes of Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson had been added to the library shelves, where Clarendon and Burnet reigned before them, too often they only pa.s.sed to a state of dignified retirement and slumber. No hand disturbed them save that of the conscientious housemaid who dusted them in due season. They were part of the furnis.h.i.+ngs indispensable to the elegance of a 'gentleman's seat'; and in many cases the guests, unless a Gibbon were among them, remained ignorant whether the labels on their backs told a truthful tale, or whether they disguised an ingenious box or backgammon board, or formed a mere covering to the wall.

The fault was with the public more than with the authors. Those who ventured on the quest would find n.o.ble eloquence in Clarendon, lively narrative in Burnet, critical a.n.a.lysis in Hume; but the indolence of the Universities and the ignorance of the general public unfitted them for the effort required to value a knowledge of history or to take steps to acquire it. It is true that the majestic style of Clarendon was puzzling to a generation accustomed to prose of the fas.h.i.+on inaugurated by Dryden and Addison; and that Hume and other historians, with all their precision and clearness, were wanting in fervour and imagination. But the record of English history was so glorious, so full of interest for the patriot and for the politician, that it should have spoken for itself, and the apathy of the educated cla.s.ses was not creditable to them. Even so Ezekiel found the Israelites of his day, forgetful of their past history and its lessons, sunk in torpor and indifference. He looked upon the wreckage of his nation, settled in the Babylonian plain; in his fervent imagination he saw but a valley of dry bones, and called aloud to the four winds that breath should come into them and they should live.

In our islands the prophets who wielded the most potent spell came from beyond the Border. Walter Scott exercised the wider influence, Carlyle kindled the intenser flame. As artists they followed very different methods. Scott, like a painter, wielding a vigorous brush full charged with human sympathies, set before us a broad canvas in lively colours filled with a warm diffused light. Carlyle worked more in the manner of an etcher, the mordant acid eating deep into the plate. From the depth of his shadows would stand out single figures or groups, in striking contrast, riveting the attention and impressing themselves on the memory. Scott drew thousands of readers to sympathize with the men and women of an earlier day, and to feel the romance that attaches to lost causes in Church and State. Carlyle set scores of students striving to recreate the great men of the past and by their standards to reject the s.h.i.+bboleths of the present. However different were the methods of the enchanters, the dry bones had come to life. Mediaeval abbot and crusader, cavalier and covenanter, Elizabeth and Cromwell, spoke once more with a living voice to ears which were opened to hear.

Nor did the English Universities fail to send forth men who could meet the demands of a generation which was waking up to a healthier political life. The individual who achieved most in popularizing English history was Macaulay, who began to write his famous Essays in 1825, the year after he won his fellows.h.i.+p at Trinity, though the world had to wait another twenty-five years for his History of the English Revolution.

Since then Cambridge historians like Acton, or Maitland, have equalled or excelled him in learning, though none has won such brilliant success.

But it was the Oxford School which did most, in the middle of the nineteenth century, to clear up the dark places of our national record and to present a complete picture of the life of the English people.

Freeman delved long among the chronicles of Normans and Saxons; Stubbs no less laboriously excavated the charters of the Plantagenets; Froude hewed his path through the State papers of the Tudors; while Gardiner patiently unravelled the tangled skein of Stuart misgovernment. John Richard Green, one of the youngest of the school, took a wider subject, the continuous history of the English people. He was fortunate in writing at a time when the public was prepared to find the subject interesting, but he himself did wonders in promoting this interest, and since then his work has been a lamp to light teachers on the way.

In a twofold way Green may claim to be a child of Oxford. Not only was he a member of the University, but he was a native of the town, being born in the centre of that ancient city in the year of Queen Victoria's accession. His family had been engaged in trade there for two generations without making more than a competence; and even before his father died in 1852 they were verging on poverty. Of his parents, who were kind and affectionate, but not gifted with special talents, there is little to be told; the boy was inclined, in after life, to attribute any literary taste that he may have inherited to his mother. From his earliest days reading was his pa.s.sion, and he was rarely to be seen without a book. Old church architecture and the sound of church bells also kindled his childish enthusiasms, and he would h.o.a.rd his pence to purchase the joy of being admitted into a locked-up church. So he was fortunate in being sent at the age of eight to Magdalen College School, where he had daily access to the old buildings of the College and the beautiful walks which had been trodden by the feet of Addison a century and a half before. An amusing contrast could be drawn between the decorous scholar of the seventeenth century, handsome, grave of mien, calmly pacing the gravel walk, while he tasted the delights of cla.s.sic literature, and little 'Johnny Green', a mere shrimp of a boy with bright eyes and restless ways, darting here and there, eagerly searching for anything new or exciting which he might find, whether in the bushes or in the pages of some romance which he was carrying.

But, for all his lively curiosity, Green seems to have got little out of his lessons at school. The cla.s.sic languages formed the staple of his education, and he never had that power of verbal memory which could enable him to retain the rules of the Greek grammar or to handle the Latin language with the accuracy of a scholar. He soon gave up trying to do so. Instead of aspiring to the mastery of accidence and syntax, he aimed rather at securing immunity from the rod. At Magdalen School it was still actively in use; but there were certain rules about the number of offences which must be committed in a given time to call for its application. Green was clever enough to notice this, and to shape his course accordingly; and thus his lessons became, from a sporting point of view, an unqualified success.

But his real progress in learning was due to his use of the old library in his leisure hours. Here he made acquaintance with Marco Polo and other books of travel; here he read works on history of various kinds, and became prematurely learned in the heresies of the early Church. The views which he developed, and perhaps stated too crudely, did not win approval. He was snubbed by examiners for his interest in heresiarchs, and gravely reproved by Canon Mozley[56] for justifying the execution of Charles I. The latter subject had been set for a prize essay; and the Canon was fair-minded enough to give the award to the boy whose views he disliked, but whose merit he recognized. Partial and imperfect though this education was, the years spent under the shadow of Magdalen must have had a deep influence on Green; but he tells us little of his impressions, and was only half conscious of them at the time. The incident which perhaps struck him most was his receiving a prize from the hands of the aged Dr. Routh, President of the College, who had seen Dr. Johnson in his youth, and lived to be a centenarian and the pride of Oxford in early Victorian days.

[Note 56: Rev. J. B. Mozley, 1813-78. Canon of Worcester and Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford: a Tractarian; author of essays on Strafford, Laud, &c.]

Green's school life ended in 1852, the year in which his father died. He was already at the top of the school; and to win a scholars.h.i.+p at the University was now doubly important for him. This he achieved at Jesus College, Oxford, in December 1854, after eighteen months spent with a private tutor; and, as he was too young to go into residence at once, he continued for another year to read by himself. Though he gave closer attention to his cla.s.sics he did not drop his general reading; and it was a landmark in his career when at the age of sixteen he made acquaintance with Gibbon.

His life as an undergraduate was not very happy and was even less successful than his days at school, though the fault did not lie with him. Shy and sensitive as he was, he had a sociable disposition and was naturally fitted to make friends. But he had come from a solitary life at a tutor's to a college where the men were clannish, most of them Welshmen, and few of them disposed to look outside their own circle for friends. Had Green been as fortunate as William Morris, his life at Oxford might have been different; but there was no Welshman at Jesus of the calibre of Burne-Jones; and Green lived in almost complete isolation till the arrival of Boyd Dawkins in 1857. The latter, who became in after years a well-known professor of anthropology, was Green's first real friend, and the letters which he wrote to him show how necessary it was for Green to have one with whom he could share his interests and exchange views freely. Dawkins had the scientific, Green the literary, nature and gifts; but they had plenty of common ground and were always ready to explore the records of the past, whether they were to be found in barrows, in buildings, or in books. If Dawkins was the first friend, the first teacher who influenced him was Arthur Stanley, then Canon of Christ Church and Professor of Ecclesiastical History. An accident led Green into his lecture-room one day; but he was so much delighted with the spirit of Stanley's teaching, and the life which he imparted to history, that he became a constant member of the cla.s.s. And when Stanley made overtures of friends.h.i.+p, Green welcomed them warmly.

A new influence had come into his life. Not only was his industry, which had been feeble and irregular, stimulated at last to real effort; but his att.i.tude to religious questions and to the position of the English Church was at this time sensibly modified. He had come up to the University a High Churchman; like many others at the time of the Oxford Movement, he had been led half-way towards Roman Catholicism, stirred by the historical claims and the mystic spell of Rome. But from now onwards, under the guidance of Stanley and Maurice, he adopted the views of what is called the 'Broad Church Party', which suited his moral fervour and the liberal character of his social and political opinions.

Despite, however, the stimulus given to him (perhaps too late) by Dawkins and Stanley, Green won no distinctions at the University, and few men of his day could have guessed that he would ever win distinction elsewhere. He took a dislike to the system of history-teaching then in vogue, which consisted in demanding of all candidates for the schools a knowledge of selected fragments of certain authors, giving them no choice or scope in the handling of wider subjects. He refused to enter for a cla.s.s in the one subject in which he could s.h.i.+ne, and managed to sc.r.a.pe through his examination by combining a variety of uncongenial subjects. This was perverse, and he himself recognized it to be so afterwards. All the while there was latent in him the talent, and the ambition, which might have enabled him to surpa.s.s all his contemporaries. His one literary achievement of the time was unknown to the men of his college, but it is of singular interest in view of what he came to achieve later. He was asked by the editor of the _Oxford Chronicle_, an old-established local paper, to write two articles on the history of the city of Oxford. To most undergraduates the town seemed a mere parasite of the University; to Green it was an elder sister. Many years later he complained in one of his letters that the city had been stifled by the University, which in its turn had suffered similar treatment from the Church. To this task, accordingly, he brought a ready enthusiasm and a full mind; and his articles are alive with the essence of what, since the days of his childhood, he had observed, learnt, and imagined, in the town of his birth. We see the same spirit in a letter which he wrote to Dawkins in 1860, telling him how he had given up a day to following the Mayor of Oxford when he observed the time-honoured custom of beating the bounds of the city. He describes with gusto how he trudged along roads, clambered over hedges, and even waded through marshes in order to perform the rite with scrupulous thoroughness. But it was years before he could find an audience who would appreciate his power of handling such a subject, and his University career must, on his own evidence, be written down a failure.