Godmar turned grinning to his men,
Who ran, some five or six, and beat
His head to pieces at their feet.
Ten years later, in The Earthly Paradise, Morris’s voice has changed. This was to be ‘the Big Book,’ his dearest project in the late 1860s, in which he hoped to unlock the world’s tale-hoard from the North, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. But in spite of their wide range, it was the serene and even soporific quality of the stories that gave them great success. (Florence Boos, in a study of the Victorian response to The Earthly Paradise, quotes Alfred Austin’s review: ‘Under the blossoming thorn, with lazy summer sea-waves breaking at one’s feet—such were the fitting hour and mood in which—criticism all forgot—to drink in the honeyed rhythm of this melodious storier.’) Knowing that ‘it is not easy now to feel good will towards Morris’s linear narrative,’ Joyce Tompkins tells us to read the stories with attention to their rich detail. We ask, she thinks, not too much of them, but too little. There are two kinds of movement in The Earthly Paradise, one defined by Walter Pater as ‘the desire of beauty quickened by the desire of death,’ the other a gradual progress through the melancholy and distress of the second and third parts to the ‘tolerance and resolution’ of the fourth, where in ‘Bellerophon in Lycia’ the hero learns first to forgive himself, then to forgive others.
To Sigurd the Volsung, the great epic of the North drawn from all the versions of the Volsung and Nibelung story that Morris could lay hands on, her approach is somewhat different. Jessie Kocmanova, in The Maturing of William Morris, interpreted Sigurd as corresponding to three stages of society—the barbarian, the early Nordic, and the feudal—which brought dissent and ruin. Joyce Tompkins sees Sigurd as a redeemer, and the whole poem not as Christian, but presented at least ‘in words and images that recall the Christian legacy.’
This is one of the underlying ideas or perhaps hopes of her book. She takes, for example, the cold and empty glance of the King of the Undying in The Story of the Glittering Plain as representing Morris’s loss of faith as a young man. About this, however, he never showed the slightest regret, anchoring himself in human happiness and human work, and to ‘the earth and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it.’ He refused, in any case, to discuss religion, and ‘in the circumstances’—as she says— ‘there is perhaps nothing to do but to imitate his silence.’
The last section of the book is left for the late romances, on which so much work has been done in the past few years. As always, Joyce Tompkins is thorough, discussing in detail the neglected Child Christopher and Fair Goldilind and the unfinished Desiderius and Killian of the Closes. One of her main concerns is to rescue Morris’s land-wights, sending-boats and magic islands from a rigid political interpretation. Both the young Morris and the harassed middle-aged socialist looking back on his former self can, she thinks, be recognized here. The stories ‘testify to the constant habits of his imagination.’
London Review of Books, 1988
Something Sweet to Come
An introduction to The Novel on Blue Paper, by William Morris
The novel that William Morris began to write early in 1872 is unfinished and unpublished and also untitled. I have called it The Novel on Blue Paper because it was written on blue lined foolscap, and Morris preferred to call things what they were.
The only firsthand information we have about it is a letter that Morris wrote to Louie Baldwin, Georgie Burne-Jones’s sister, on 12 June 1872.
Dear Louie,
Herewith I send by book-post my abortive novel: it is just a specimen of how not to do it, and there is no more to be said thereof: ’tis nothing but landscape and sentiment: which thing won’t do. Since you wish to read it, I am sorry ’tis such a rough copy, which roughness sufficiently indicates my impatience at having to deal with prose. The separate parcel, paged 1 to 6, was a desperate dash at the middle of the story to try to give it life when I felt it failing: it begins with the letter of the elder brother to the younger on getting his letter telling how he was going to bid for the girl in marriage. I found it in the envelope in which I had sent it to Georgie to see if she could give me any hope: she gave me none, and I have never looked at it since. So there’s an end of my novel-writing, I fancy, unless the world turns topsides under some day. Health and merry days to you, and believe me to be
Your affectionate friend,
William Morris
The tone of gruff modesty, and in particular the catchphrase from Dickens (the Circumlocution Office’s ‘How Not to Do It’), is habitual to Morris and can be taken for what it is worth. In spite of the disapproval of Georgiana Burne-Jones, whose opinion he valued at the time above all others, he did not destroy his MS, but kept it, and after what was presumably further discouragement from Louie, he kept it still. He must have been aware, too, why he had been given no hope. J. W. Mackail tells us, in his Life of Morris (1899), that Morris ‘had all the instinct of a born man of letters for laying himself open in his books, and having no concealment from the widest circle of all,’ and (of the Prologues to The Earthly Paradise) that there is ‘an autobiography so delicate and so outspoken that it must needs be left to speak for itself.’ That, we have to conclude, was the trouble with the novel on blue paper; it did speak for itself, but much too plainly.
The background of the novel—the ‘landscape’—is the Upper Thames valley, the water meadows, streams, and villages round about Kelmscott on the borders of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Morris had gone down to inspect Kelmscott Manor House in May 1871, and in June he entered into a joint tenancy of the old house with Rossetti at £60 a year. The grey gables, flagged path, enclosed garden cram-full of flowers, lime and elm trees ‘populous with rooks,’ white-panelled parlour, are all recognizably described in this novel, although Morris when he wrote it had never spent a summer there. It was the house he loved ‘with a reasonable love, I think.’ Rossetti, not a countryman, had hoped that the place would be good for his nerves. But in the seclusion of the marshes his obsession with the beauty of Jane Morris, and his compulsion to paint her again and again, reached the point of melancholy mania. Morris had a business to run and was obliged to be in London a good deal. The seemingly intolerable tension arose between the three of them that has been so often and so painfully traced by biographers. To Morris it was ‘this failure of mine.’ Mackail, cautiously describing the subject of the novel as ‘the love of two brothers for the same woman,’ evidently saw no farther into it than the failure. Once, however, when I was trying to explain the situation, and its projection as myth, to a number of overseas students, one of them asked a question that I have never seen in any biography: ‘Why then did Morris not strike Rossetti?’
I hope to show that this question is very relevant to the novel on blue paper. Certainly Morris was not ‘above,’ or indifferent to, his loss. It is a mistake to refer to his much later opinions, as reported by Shaw (‘Morris was a complete fatalist in his attitude towards the conduct of all human beings where sex was concerned’) or Luke Ionides (‘Women did not seem to count with him’) or Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (‘He was the only man I ever came in contact with who seemed absolutely independent of sex considerations’). It is a mistake, too, to refer to opinions expressed in News from Nowhere to his ‘restless heart’ of 1868—73. Which of us would like to be judged, at thirty-nine, by our frame of mind at the age of fifty-seven? Morris himself knew this well enough. ‘At the age of more than thirty years,’ he wrote in Killian of the Closes (1895), ‘men are more apt to desire what they have not than they that be younger or older.’
And Morris might have been pressed into a violent demonstration at this time by yet another cruel test, the profoundly unsettling behaviour of his greatest friend, Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones had been married since 1860 to Georgie, the charming, tiny, and indomitable daughter of a Methodist minister. The Neds had started out in lodgings with £30 between them, and their happy and stable marriage, together with Burne-Jon
es’s designs for the Firm, were part of the very earth out of which Morris’s life and work took growth. But in 1867 the quiet Ned suddenly claimed, much more openly than Rossetti, the freedom to love unchecked. He had been totally captivated by a most tempestuous member of the Greek community in London, Mary Zambaco. Of this radiantly sad and unpredictable young woman he drew the loveliest by far of his pencil portraits; ‘I believed it to be all my future life,’ he told Rossetti. The affair came and went and came again, to the fury of Ionides and the sympathetic interest of the Greek women. It lingered on, indeed, until 1873.1 Morris, stalwart, stood by his friend, but the effect of this new confounding of love and loyalty, on top of his own ‘failure,’ must have been hard to master; the effect of Mary herself can be guessed at, perhaps, from the strange intrusion of one of the characters, Eleanor, into the novel on blue paper.
Meanwhile, Georgie was left to manage her life and her two children as best she could. In his loneliness and bewilderment Morris felt deeply for her, and at this time he was unquestionably in love with her.
Some of his drafts and manuscript poems of 1865—70 show this without disguise, though always with a chivalrous anxiety. He must not intrude; he thanks her because she ‘does not deem my service sin.’ A pencil note reads on one draft ‘we two are in the same box and need conceal nothing—scold me but pardon me.’ He is ‘late made wise’ to his own feelings, and can only trust that time will transform them into the friendship that will bring him peace. Meanwhile the dignity and sincerity with which she is bearing ‘the burden of thy grief and wrong’ is enough, in itself, to check him.
…nor joy nor grief nor fear
Silence my love; but those grey eyes and clear
Truer than truth pierce through my weal and woe…
Georgie, in fact, was steadfast to her marriage, and strong enough to wait. ‘I know one thing,’ she wrote to her friend Rosalind Howard, ‘and that is that there is love enough between Edward and me to last out a long life if it is given us.’
In the meantime, what was Morris’s outward response to the assault on his emotions? Work, as always, was his ‘faithful daily companion.’ After returning from Iceland in September 1871 he illuminated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, designed the Larkspur wallpaper, began his novel, and fiddled about in ‘a maze of re-writing and despondency’ with his elaborate masque, Love Is Enough. But the moral of Love Is Enough (as Shaw complained) is not that love is enough. Pharamond, coming back from his quest for an ideal woman to find that his kingdom has been usurped by a stronger man, accepts that frustration and loss are worthy—‘though the world be awaning’—to be called a victory in the name of love. But Morris knew, as Shaw knew, that this is nonsense. The victory, melancholy as it is, is for self-control. Renunciation is achieved through the will and strengthens the will, not the emotions. And this, with a far more positive hero than poor Pharamond, is, I believe, the real subject of the novel on blue paper.
Morris had been delicate as a child, but as soon as he grew into his full strength he was subject to fits of violent rage, possibly epileptic in origin. To what extent these were hereditary it is impossible to say. His father was said to be neurotic, and may well have clashed with his eldest son; when Morris was eleven he was sent as a boarder to his school at Woodford, although it was only a few hundred yards away from his home. What seems strange in his later life is the attitude of his close friends, who appear to have watched as a kind of entertainment his frenzied outbursts, followed by the struggle to control himself and a rapid childlike repentance. At times he would beat himself about the head in self-punishment. ‘He has been known to drive his head against a wall,’ Mackail wrote, ‘so as to make a deep dent in the plaster, and bite almost through the woodwork of a windowframe.’ Yet with the exception of the day when he hurled a fifteenth-century folio at one of his workmen, missing him but breaking a door panel, there is no record of his making a physical attack on anyone. To return to the student’s question, Morris did not strike anybody, least of all the ailing Rossetti, because he waged almost to the end of his life a battle for self-control.
The recognition of restraint as an absolute duty may be referred back to the tutor who prepared Morris, when he was seventeen years old, for his entrance to Oxford. This tutor, the Reverend F. B. Guy, was one of the faithful remnants of the Oxford Movement who had survived Newman’s conversion, or desertion, to Rome. Morris believed at this time that he was going to enter the Church, and could not fail to learn from Guy the Movement’s insistence on sacrifice and self-correction, even in the smallest things. The Tractarians saw the religious impulse not as a vague emotion, but as a silent discipline growing from the exercise of the will. All that we ought to ask, Keble had said, is room to deny ourselves. And Morris, willingly enlisted in a struggle that he was never to win, persisted in it long after he had parted from orthodox Christianity. At the age of twenty-three he concluded that he must not expect enjoyment from life—‘I have no right to it at all events—love and work, these two things only.’ In 1872, when love had betrayed or rejected him, he wrote: ‘O how I long to keep the world from narrowing on me, and to look at things bigly and kindly.’
The most telling expression of Keble’s doctrines in fiction was Charlotte M. Yonge’s Heir of Redclyffe (1853). It was said to be the novel most in demand by the officers wounded in the Crimean War, and it was the first book greatly to influence Morris. Here he read the family story of a tragic inheritance. Guy, the heir, has the ferocious temper of his Morville ancestors, and has to struggle as best he can with ‘the curse of sin and death.’ All his ‘animal spirits,’ all his great capacity for happiness is overshadowed by the temptation to anger, and he is driven to strange extremes, cutting up pencils, biting his lips till the blood runs down, and refusing, in obedience to a vow, even to watch a single game of billiards. ‘Resistance should be from within.’ He sees his whole life as ‘failing and resolving and failing again.’ Philip, on the other hand, the high-minded young officer, provokes the heir and leads him, from the best possible motives, into temptation. Here the novel sets out to show the evil that good can do, and when Guy dies to save him from fever, Philip is left to suffer forever ‘the penitence of the saints.’
The Heir of Redclyffe, as an exemplary text, asks for a kind of inner or even secret knowledge from its readers. From page to page we are reminded of Kenelm Digby’s Broadstone of Honour (1822—27), which held up the example of mediaeval chivalry to Young England. That is why Guy’s nearest railway station is called Broadstone. Again, Guy and his sweetheart Amy are, in a sense, acting out the story of Sintram (the book which Newman would only read when he was quite alone).2
Sintram, tempted by the world, the flesh, and the devil, and burdened by his father’s crime, has to toil upward through the snows to reach Verena, his saintly mother. That is why the widowed Amy calls her child Verena. And Sintram itself makes mysterious reference to its frontispiece, a woodcut version of Dürer’s engraving The Knight, Death, and the Devil, over which Morris and Burne-Jones, as students, had ‘pored for hours.’
These potent images remained with Morris, even though in The Earthly Paradise he had unlocked half the world’s tale-hoard. In the second of his late romances, for example, The Well at the World’s End (1892—93), Sintram’s evil dwarf reappears. In 1872, the time of his greatest emotional test and stress, he set to work on this novel that is a temptation story, although the hero must proceed simply on his own resolution, without prayer, without divine grace, without the saving hand of the loved woman. And, most unexpectedly, Morris returned from his dream-world, the ‘nameless cities in a distant sea,’ to place the story in a solid English parsonage, or, to be more accurate, in Elm House, Walthamstow, the first home that he could remember.
Morris opens his tale with the sins of the father. One of those impulses which ‘sometimes touch dull, or dulled, natures’—a distinction which Morris was always careful to make—arouses the train of memory in Parson Risley. Eleanor’s lette
rs follow. The parson’s sin is not that he was Eleanor’s lover. This is shown clearly enough later in Mrs Mason’s reproach: ‘Mr Risley, if my husband likes to make love to every girl in the village, he has a full right to it, if I let him’—a remark that blends well with the ‘sweet-smelling abundant garden’ and the fertile melon beds. Risley’s guilt then, is not a matter of sexuality but a denial of it, firstly through cold cowardice in rejecting a woman ‘like the women in poetry, such people as I had never expected to meet,’ and secondly through his vile temper. These two aspects of his nature are his legacy to his sons.
The parsonage, as has been said, recalls the house in Walthamstow where Morris was born, and in the two boys, John and Arthur, he represents the opposing sides, as he understood them, of his own character. In some ways the brothers are alike or even identical. Both are romantically imaginative and given to dreaming their lives into ‘tales going on,’ both are fond of fishing (not a trivial matter to Morris), both, of course, love Clara, both dislike their father yet resemble him. ‘As to the looks of the lads, by the way, it would rather have puzzled anyone who had seen them to say why the little doctor should have said that either was not like his father. Some strange undercurrent of thought must have drawn it out of him, for they were obviously both very much like him.’ John, however, is manly, open, friendly, bird-and-weather-noticing; Arthur is a bookworm, and sickly. (‘Love of ease, dreaminess, sloth, sloppy goodnature,’ Morris said, ‘are what I chiefly accuse myself of.’). Arthur is ‘versed in archaeological lore,’ while John is in touch with earth and water—‘with a great sigh of enjoyment he seemed to gather the bliss of memory of many and many a summer afternoon into this one’—and yet, perversely, Arthur is to be the farmer and John the businessman.
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