Читать книгу William Morris - Arthur Clutton-Brock - Страница 6

In 1855 Morris took his degree, and in January 1856 he was articled to George Edmund Street, one of the chief architects of the Gothic Revival and the designer of the Law Courts. He was, as Morris said, “a good architect as things go now”; but he produced imitation Gothic under conditions utterly different from those in which the real Gothic had grown, and it was impossible that Morris should be satisfied with the work he did or should wish to do work like it. Morris became his pupil, no doubt, because he was more interested in architecture than in any other art; but he was not born to be an architect, at least under conditions at that time. This he soon discovered, but in Street’s office he learnt some useful things and met Philip Webb, who was afterwards the chief figure, not in the Gothic Revival, but in the revival of architecture. Webb became one of his closest friends and they co-operated in many works of art.

Nowadays we have art students instead of apprentices; and there is always a danger that the student, even if he is articled to an architect, will spend too long in learning instead of doing. Morris from the first was not content to be a mere student. Besides working hard in his office he began to model in clay, to carve in wood and stone, and to illuminate, on his own account. And though he was his own teacher in these arts and in many others, he seemed to know by instinct the right way of practicing them and wasted no time in mistaken experiments. This instinctive tightness, which was a kind of natural sagacity applied to the arts, was the secret of his versatility. He might vary in the quality of his work, but it was never wrong in intention; and therefore he never had to unlearn what he had learnt.

Until then Morris had never met a great man and had gone his own way unaffected by any strong personal influence; but in London he met Rossetti, who was teaching Burne-Jones to paint, and of the many men who fell under Rossetti’s spell he, perhaps, was the most completely subdued by it. We can admire Rossetti’s poetry and pictures; but to those who knew him he seemed far greater than anything that he did. Or rather they saw in his works all that magic of the man himself which is dead to us. He could tell what he wanted to do in such a way that it seemed to be done and also seemed to be the only thing worth doing in the world. When Morris and Burne-Jones first knew him he was at the height of his powers. His ambition was to do for the art of painting what the Romantic poets had done for poetry, i.e., to quicken it with passion and with the beauty that comes of passion clearly expressed. While in France the impressionist painters were trying to represent a new order of facts, Rossetti in England was trying to express in painting a new state of mind. He was not content with poetic subjects, like the dull illustrators of the time; he wished also to treat them poetically like the great Italian primitives. To Burne-Jones and Morris he seemed to be transforming the art of painting, giving to it that purpose and intensity, which they hoped, were soon to quicken the whole of society. They lived in the expectation that great things were about to happen in the world; and here already they were happening in art. What Ruskin taught, Rossetti did and made others do; and, as Morris and Burne-Jones cared more for art than for anything else, he seemed to them a Messiah who could show them, and the world if it would listen, the way to salvation. Eager youth both desires and believes that the problems of life may be made quite simple for it; and it will therefore submit itself utterly to a hero who seems to simplify them. Rossetti, who cared for nothing but art, offered the promise of simplification; and for some years Morris was, as it were, in love with him. When Burne-Jones said that he feared to become a mere imitator of Rossetti, Morris replied: “I have got beyond that. I want to imitate Gabriel as much as I can.”

Rossetti wished every one to be a painter. “If a man has any poetry in him,” he said, “he should paint, for it has all been said and written and they have scarcely begun to paint it.” Therefore, though he admired Morris’s poetry, he told him that he too must be a painter. Morris wrote in a letter:

“Rossetti says I ought to paint. […] He says I shall be able; now as he is a very great man and speaks with authority and not as the Scribes, I must try… so I am going to try, not giving up architecture, but trying if it is possible to get six hours a day for drawing besides office work. […] I can’t enter into politico-social subjects with any interest, for on the whole I see that things are in a muddle, and I have no power or vocation to set them right in ever so little a degree. My work is the embodiment of dreams in one form or another.”

Here he says in prose just what he was still saying twelve years later in verse: “Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, why should I strive to set the crooked straight?”

But even in this determination to forget the evils of the world and in this very insistence that he is a dreamer, we can see the beginnings of the conflict that was to shake his life. Rossetti did not call himself a dreamer; for to him art was the chief reality. Morris now was trying to make it the chief reality for himself, but he could not separate it from other things; and in the end it was art, and his hopes and fears for it, that drew him out of his shadowy isle of bliss.

26. Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris (for the design) and Morris & Co. (for the production), Pomona, 1885. Tapestry woven wool, silk and mohair on a cotton warp, 300 × 210 cm. The Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester, Manchester.

27. William Morris and John Henry Dearle (for the design) and Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (for the production), The Orchard or The Seasons, c. 1863. Tapestry woven wool, silk and mohair on a cotton warp, 221 × 472 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

28. John Henry Dearle (for the design), Edward Burne-Jones (for the figures) and Morris & Co. (for the production), Angeli Laudantes, 1894. Tapestry woven wool, silk and mohair on a cotton warp, 237.5 × 202 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

29. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dantis Amor, 1860. Oil on panel, 74.9 × 81.3 cm. Tate Gallery, London.

At present, however, Rossetti’s word was law; and since Rossetti told him to be a painter he became one. He finished little, but his Queen Guenevere, also called La Belle Iseult, is one of the finest of all Pre Raphaelite pictures and equal in merit to his poem, the Defence of Guenevere. Yet he said that the frame of a picture always bothered him, and this saying expresses the whole difference between him and Rossetti. For Rossetti art was always in a frame and made more intense by its very isolation. It was something into which you escaped from life; but Morris rather wanted to turn all life into art and enjoyed the triumph of art most when it glorified things of use. For him, though he soon gave up the purpose of being an architect, the great art was always architecture; for in that he saw use made beautiful and the needs of men ennobled by their manner of satisfying them. And all the art that he most loved, at first by instinct and afterwards on principle, was of the same nature as architecture and distinguished by the same kind of excellence. What we call decorative art was more than decoration to him. It pleased him like a smile of happiness, for he felt in it the well being both of the artist and of those for whom he worked. To Rossetti art was the expression of the artist’s more peculiar emotions; and this he found most intense and complete in isolated works of art such as pictures. But Morris always saw in a work of art the relation between the artist and his public; and it was for him a social business that could not be well practiced 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.

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:

still seems to haunt me, and this other stanza:

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.

33. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., Gourds Room panel from the Green Dining Room, 1863.

Victoria & Albert Museum, London.