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Arthur Clutton-Brock. William Morris
Introduction
The Early Years, a Promising Future
Childhood and Youth
The Influence of Rossetti
The Founding of the Firm
Morris as a Romantic Poet
A Flowering Career
The Revival of Arts and Crafts
The Sagas and “Sigurd”
Morris as a Socialist
Maturity and Assertion
The Prose Romances and Later Poems
Later Years and Character
The Ideas of William Morris
Bibliography
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Out of respect to the author’s original work, this text has not been corrected or updated, particularly regarding attribution, dates, and the current locations of works. These were uncertain at the time of the text’s first publication, and sometimes remain so to this day. The information in the captions, however, has been updated.
From the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, we have passed through a period of aesthetic discontent which continues and which is distinct from the many kinds of discontent by which men have been troubled in former ages. No doubt aesthetic discontent has existed before; men have often complained that the art of their own time was inferior to the art of the past; but they have never before been so conscious of this inferiority or felt that it was a reproach to their civilisation and a symptom of some disease affecting the whole of their society. We, powerful in many things beyond any past generation of men, feel that in this one respect we are more impotent than many tribes of savages. We can make things such as men have never made before; but we cannot express any feelings of our own in the making of them, and the vast new world of cities which we have made and are making so rapidly, seems to us, compared with the little slow-built cities of the past, either blankly inexpressive or pompously expressive of something which we would rather not have expressed. That is what we mean when we complain of the ugliness of most modern things made by men. They say nothing to us or they say what we do not want to hear, and therefore we should prefer a world without them.
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5. William Frend De Morgan (for the design) and Sands End Pottery (for the production), Panel, 1888–1897. Buff-coloured earthenware, with painting over a white slip, 61.4 × 40.5 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
6. The Months of the Year, 1863–1864. Hand-painted tiles. Old Hall, Queens College, Cambridge.
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