io Under the purple thyme and the purple clover
Sleeping at last. 1896
3. Tides that do not rise to the high-water mark of in which 'the last shall be first.' See Matthew the spring tides. 20.16, Luke 13.30. 4. Rossetti alludes to the parable of the vineyard, WILLIAM MORRIS 1834-1896
In his autobiography William Butler Yeats observes that if some angel offered him
the choice, he would rather live William Morris's life than his own or any other man's.
Morris's career was more multifaceted than that of any other Victorian writer. He
was a poet, a writer of prose romances, a painter, a designer of furniture, a business
man, a printer, and a leader of the British socialist movement.
Born of wealthy parents and brought up in the Essex countryside, he went to Oxford
with the intention of becoming a clergyman. However, art for him soon displaced
religion. At Oxford he discovered the work of John Ruskin, which was, in his words,
'a revelation.' Later in life he wrote, 'It was through him that I learned to give form
to my discontent. . . . Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading
.
1482 / WILLIAM MORRIS
passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.' Morris's career in
many ways realized Ruskin's views. In 1861 Morris and several friends founded a
company to design and produce furniture, wallpaper, textiles, stained glass, tapestries,
and carpets, objects still prized today as masterpieces of decorative art. Morris's aim
was not only to make beautiful things but to restore creativity to modern manufacture,
much as Ruskin had urged in 'The Nature of Gothic,' a chapter in The Stones of
Venice (1851?53). The minor arts, he believed, were in a state of complete degra
dation; through his firm he wanted to restore beauty of design and individual
craftsmanship. In his design work Morris developed close ties with the Pre-Raphaelite Brother
hood, a society of artists that had been cofounded by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who became a particular friend. In 1858 Morris published a remarkable book of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere, and other Poems, which some critics regard as the finest book of Pre-Raphaelite verse. Using medieval materials, the poems plunge the reader into the middle of dramatic situations with little sense of larger narrative context or even right and wrong, where little is clear but the vividness of the characters' perceptions. After The Defence of Guenevere, Morris turned from lyric to narrative, publishing The Life and Death of Jason (1867) and The Earthly Paradise (1868?70), a series of twenty-four classical and medieval tales. He then discovered the Icelandic sagas. He cotranslated the Volsunga Saga and wrote a poem based on it, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung (1876). In 1877 he founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient
Buildings. In the late 1870s, after Morris came to the conclusion that art could not have real
life and growth under the commercialism of modern society, he turned to socialism.
In 1883 he joined the Socialist Democratic Federation; the next year he led the
secession of a large faction to found the Socialist League. He was at the center of
socialist activity in England through the rest of the decade. At the famous debates
held on Sunday evenings at Morris's house, political and literary figures regularly
gathered, including Yeats and Bernard Shaw. Morris lectured and wrote tirelessly for
the cause, producing essays, columns, and a series of socialist literary works, including
A Dream of John Ball (1887) and News from Noivhere (1890), a Utopian vision of life
under communism in twenty-first-century England. In 1890 Morris's health failed and factionalism brought his leadership of the Social
ist League to an end. In 1891 he cofounded the Kelmscott Press, the first fine art
press in England, whose masterpiece was the Kelmscott Chaucer, an edition of The
Canterbury Tales with illustrations by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne Jones
and designs by Morris himself. In the obituary he published after Morris's death, Shaw wrote, 'He was ultra
modern?not merely up-to-date, but far ahead of it: his wall papers, his hangings, his
tapestries, and his printed books have the twentieth century in every touch of them.'
Not only did Morris develop design principles that remained important in the twen
tieth century, but he also had a radical vision of the relationship of aesthetics to
politics. He was, as Shaw said, 'a complete artist.'
