“MORRIS AS WORK-MASTER:” A LEC- 
 TURE DELIVERED BY W. R. LETHABY AT 
 THE BIRMINGHAM MUNICIPAL SCHOOL 
 OF ART ON THE 26TH OF OCTOBER, 1901. 
 
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 LONDON 
 
 JOHN HOGG, 13 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. 
 
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 BIRMINGHAM : 
 
 CORNISH BROS., 37 NEW STREET. 
 
 COPYRIGHT '.] 
 
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“ THE STUDY AND PRACTICE OF ARTISTIC 
 CRAFTS : ” AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BY W. 
 R. LETHABY. 21 pp. Price 6d. net. Published 
 by JOHN HOGG, 13, PATERNOSTER ROW, 
 LONDON, E.C., and CORNISH BROTHERS, 
 37, NEW STREET, BIRMINGHAM. 
 
“MORRIS AS WORK-MASTER:” A LEC- 
 TURE DELIVERED BY W. R. LETHABY AT 
 THE BIRMINGHAM MUNICIPAL SCHOOL 
 OF ART ON THE 26TH OF OCTOBER, 1901. 
 
 (WITH A FRONTISPIECE.) 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 JOHN HOGG, 13 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. 
 BIRMINGHAM : 
 
 CORNISH BROS., 37 NEW STREET. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2016 
 
 https://archive.org/details/morrisasworkmastOOIeth 
 

 
 
 
 
KING ALFRED. 
 
 CARTOON FOR STAINED GLASS BY WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 
 By permission of Messrs. Morris & Co. 
 
“ Morris as Work-master.” 
 
 N speaking of Morris, I hope you may find 
 an attitude of reverence less tiring than an 
 affectation of judicial restraint; that attitude 
 of detachment, which, to make one’s estimate 
 of a life look true and unbiassed, sprinkles the telling 
 of it with a due number of unfairnesses. Moreover, 
 it must be said that much of what in England usually 
 passes for art criticism consists in saying, how fine 
 a work would be if it were only quite different from 
 what it is. In this kind of criticism the critic is 
 doing nothing more than measuring his own stature 
 against a standard. Such a critic seems only anxious 
 to define the limitations of his own mind. 
 
 In the first part of this paper I give some outline 
 of Morris’s art-teaching and life, and end with an 
 attempt at an explanation of some of the ideas and 
 principles exemplified in his works. 
 
 “ I was born and bred,” says Morris, in “ News 
 from Nowhere,” “ on the edge of Epping Forest — 
 Walthamstow and Woodford, to wit. A pretty place, 
 
 a very jolly place When I was a boy, 
 
 and for a long time after, except for a piece about 
 Queen Elizabeth’s Lodge, and for the part about 
 High Beach, the Forest was almost wholly made 
 up of pollard hornbeams mixed with holly thickets.” 
 Further on in the same book another memory of the 
 scenes of his boyhood is preserved, where, speaking 
 
 i 
 
of the Essex Marshes, he says : “ What with the 
 beasts and the men, and the scattered red-tiled roofs, 
 and the big hayricks, it does not make a bad holiday 
 to get a quiet pony and ride about there on a sunny 
 afternoon of autumn, and look over the river and 
 the craft passing up and down, and on to Shooters 
 Hill and the Kentish uplands, and then turn round 
 to the wide green sea of the Essex marsh-land, with 
 the great domed line of the sky, and the sun shining 
 down in one flood of peaceful light.” 
 
 There must have been much to direct such a 
 genius and feed his spirit in this life at the edge of 
 the forest sixty-five years ago (how remote it seems 
 now!), when he “cut about on his Shetland pony,” 
 and explored the forest “yard by yard, from Wan- 
 stead to the Theydons, and from Hale End to 
 Fairlop Oak.” “ When we were children,” he said, 
 “every house in the fields was the Fairyland King’s 
 house to us.” “To this day, when I smell a may- 
 tree I think of going to bed by daylight.” 
 
 By seven years of age he had read the whole of 
 Scott’s novels, which ever remained associated in his 
 mind with a tapestry room of “ faded greenery ” at 
 Queen Elizabeth’s Lodge. 
 
 When he was eight years old he saw Canterbury 
 Cathedral and Minster Church, which last, from this 
 visit alone, he always remembered distinctly; indeed, 
 he never saw it again. As a boy of nine, “ he rode 
 half Essex over in search of old churches.” The 
 sight of these old Essex churches, then unrestored 
 and romantic, bedraggled though most of them were 
 in a comparatively innocent way by churchwarden- 
 ing, had untold consequences on such a mind. The 
 mysterious whispering woods, the pathetic beauty of 
 2 
 
the churches, and the spell of Scott’s romance, aroused 
 his mind, a dozen years before most of us begin 
 to think, to the wonder of the Middle Ages, to the 
 love of the old monuments, and to the imagining of 
 what the country looked like “ then,” which he later 
 called his “ archaeological natural-history side.” 
 
 After school at Marlborough, Morris went up to 
 Oxford in 1852, and Burne-Jones sat in the same 
 entrance examination. Story has it, that Burne- 
 Jones, sitting at his side, wrote on his Latin paper, 
 under the name William Morris, “ His Horace.” 
 When he went up Oxford was still largely un- 
 spotted by the world of steam civilisation, and 
 such a great work of art, which filled his heart 
 with its beauty, could only be expected to finally 
 confirm a twig so bent. The gradual destruction of 
 this Oxford by the professionally learned (“ knowing 
 noodles” he called them) was an injury to history 
 and to modern life which he could never forgive. 
 
 Oxford, however, gave him the master friendships 
 of his life, with Burne-Jones and Faulkner and Webb. 
 The great events of his residence at Oxford were the 
 meeting with these men, the reading of Malory, 
 Froissart, Ruskin, and Browning, and the establish- 
 ing of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. 
 
 Ruskin at once became his acknowledged master, 
 “ who,” as he said at a later time, “ let a flood of 
 daylight into the cloud of sham technical twaddle 
 which was once the whole staple of art criticism.” 
 “ Ruskin was a man of genius, the author of one of 
 the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of 
 the century.” It is interesting to record that Ruskin, 
 in conversation a few years ago, guaranteed that 
 “ Morris is beaten gold.” 
 
 3 
 
It now seems inevitable that Morris’s mind should 
 have fixed on the study of architecture. He seems 
 to have taken in the Builder journal from the time of 
 going up to Oxford, and his days off were still spent 
 in visiting churches and rubbing brasses. The long 
 vacation of the first year he also devoted to visiting 
 English churches, and in the following year he went 
 to France, and saw Amiens, Beauvais, Chartres, 
 Rouen, and other places. The next year again he 
 was in France with Burne-Jones, and saw, as he 
 exultingly writes, nine cathedrals and twenty-four 
 other great churches. What he thought of Amiens 
 is written in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. 
 Of Rouen, he, twenty-five years later, recalled 
 “ what a wonder of glory that was to me when I 
 first came upon the front of the cathedral rising 
 above the flower market.” 
 
 At the close of this French journey Burne-Jones 
 and himself resolved not to enter the Church, but to 
 follow Art. In November, 1855, he wrote to his 
 mother as to his determination, and of his new inten- 
 tion of making himself a “ decent architect,” and how 
 he would, by his change of plan, “ by no means give 
 up ” his thought of “ bettering the world.” Even 
 at this moment, however, he was perfectly clear- 
 sighted and curiously unenthusiastic as to any hope 
 for architecture of the old kind in the present day. 
 In this same letter he wrote of Street, “ he is a good 
 architect, as things go now, and has a great deal of 
 business.” 
 
 Fie entered into articles with Street in January, 
 1856, but a month or two was time enough to 
 convince him that there was nothing for him in the 
 methods of the office-bred architect, which would 
 
 4 
 
only allow him to come into touch with building at 
 the end of a compass point. The principal work in 
 Street’s office, besides the customary church scrapings 
 of a diocesan “ practice,” was a competition for a 
 church at Lille. Morris, after copying a drawing 
 became restless and began to write poetry, and after 
 about six months of it, and after meeting Rossetti, 
 his mind turned towards painting, as an art with 
 which he might get into more effective contact. 
 Street’s office moved to London at this time, and so 
 Morris was once more with Burne-Jones, who had 
 come before, and with him he now shared rooms. 
 
 In two or three months more Morris entirely 
 relinquished the profession of an architect, but that 
 which he later called “ the noble craft of house 
 building” ever remained in his estimation as first 
 amongst the employments of men. 
 
 Twenty years after this time Burne-Jones wrote : — 
 “ I think Morris’s friendship began everything for 
 me; everything that I afterwards cared for. We 
 were freshmen together at Exeter. When I left 
 Oxford I got to know Rossetti. He is, as you know, 
 the most generous of men to the young. He taught 
 me practically all I ever learned. He gave me 
 courage to commit myself to imagination without 
 shame.” In a letter of Rossetti’s to Bell-Scott, in 
 June, 1857, he sa y s that “ Morris is now painting his 
 first picture, Sir Tristram in the garden of King 
 Mark’s Palace recognised by the dog he had given to 
 Iseult from the Morte d’Arthur. It is being done all 
 from Nature, of course, and, I believe, will turn out 
 capitally.” About six months later, Rossetti wrote to 
 Madox Brown, “ Plint has bought Topsy’s picture 
 
 for £>7S” 
 
 5 
 
The series of paintings in the Debating Hall at 
 Oxford was now undertaken by a group of volunteers 
 comprising Burne-Jones, Morris, Arthur Hughes 
 and others, with Rossetti as captain. “A more bril- 
 liant company ” says a recent writer, “ it would, out 
 of paradise, be difficult to select.” 
 
 Rossetti’s admiration for his helpers, may be read 
 in his recently published letters. Of Morris, I am 
 told that he often said that he was “ the most spon- 
 taneous of the lot.” When his picture was finished, 
 Morris set to, to paint the ceiling all over with 
 pattern work. This, which was probably an outcome 
 of some studies in illumination made a short time 
 before, was, with that exception, his earliest orna- 
 mental work. 
 
 This brings us to the year of the building, for 
 himself, of the Red House, Bexley Heath, into which 
 Morris was now to put all his force and to which 
 the whole group contributed so much that it prac- 
 tically became the next stage of action for the 
 brotherhood. A piece of orchard ground was found 
 by Morris, when the trees happened to be in blossom, 
 and was instantly bought. Philip Webb was architect 
 and the others made offerings of the work of their 
 hands. What with Burne-Jones and Rossetti paint- 
 ings on the walls, doors, and furniture, and Morris’s 
 decorations on walls and ceilings, and in glass and 
 embroidery, it became a house of all the talents. 
 Burne-Jones painted the story of Sir Degravaunt on 
 the drawing room walls, Morris himself figuring as 
 the hero, Rossetti’s meeting of Dante and Beatrice 
 was painted on a door. In May i860 Rossetti wrote 
 to Brown “ The towers of Topsy darken the air,” and 
 in January 1862 he wrote to Norton “I wish you 
 
 6 
 
could see the house which Morris (who has money) 
 has built for himself in Kent. It is a most noble 
 work in every way and more a poem than a house, 
 such as anything else could lead you to conceive, but 
 an admirable place to live in too.” 
 
 The work went forward with infinite frolic and 
 expenditure of practical jokes ; one of which may be 
 told. After Morris had been busy diapering a wall 
 with a motto which he had taken for himself — “ If I 
 can,” Burne-Jones came while it was yet dawn and 
 added to the legend the words, “ but I can’t.” 
 
 The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine had been 
 conducted by what we may call the Morris brother- 
 hood. The decoration of the Oxford Hall was 
 undertaken by two of the members of this brother- 
 hood and two of the old Pre-Raphaelites ; Webb, too, 
 whom Morris had met in Street’s office, was now 
 drawn in as interested spectator. The Red House 
 was carried out by practically the same band. After 
 working together so long was the group to break 
 up ? At this very time the Great Exhibition of 
 1862 was being prepared for, and it seems quite 
 likely that the more strict association to be known as 
 Morris and Co., made in 1861, was entered into 
 under this impetus — it was something to keep them 
 together as a band. The artist members of the firm 
 were Rossetti, Madox-Brown, Morris, Burne-Jones, 
 and Philip W ebb. 
 
 In the letter of Rossetti to Norton before quoted, 
 dated January, 1862, he goes on to say, “ I wish you 
 could see a painted cabinet with the history of St. 
 George, and other furniture of great beauty which we 
 have in hand. We have bespoke space at the Great 
 Exhibition. Our stained glass, at any rate, may 
 
 7 ‘ 
 
challenge any other firm to approach it. Morris and 
 Webb the architect, are our most active men of busi- 
 ness as regards the actual conduct of the concern ; 
 the rest of us are chiefly confining ourselves to con- 
 tributing designs when called for.” 
 
 The cabinet here mentioned was painted by Morris 
 himself, it is a long low sideboard-cabinet, having 
 three doors painted with subjects most dramatically 
 imagined from the story of St. George ; the paintings 
 being heightened on the robes and armour with gold 
 and silver. The first panel shows a herald making a 
 proclamation and the princess being led away ; the 
 second shows her bound to a tree, to which is attached 
 a scroll saying she is offered to the dragon, and a 
 second scene shows her rescue ; the third panel depicts 
 the procession back to the rejoicing town, an enor- 
 mous dragon’s head being borne on a pole behind 
 them. 
 
 Inside, the cupboards are painted with the fine red 
 known as “ dragon’s blood,” a conceit which Morris 
 must have chuckled over. Painted furniture appears 
 amongst the classes of work named in the first pros- 
 pectus issued by the firm ; and two or three years 
 before this time Rossetti had painted a big chair, de- 
 signed by Morris, with a subject from the “Morte 
 D’Arthur ” ; but probably the most remarkable of all 
 the pieces so produced was a large upright cabinet, 
 of which the doors were painted by Burne-Jones with 
 subjects from Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale.” This was 
 a wedding present to Morris and a contribution to 
 the Red House. Burne-Jones’s painted furniture of 
 a later day — the Graham piano and the St. Margaret 
 clavichord — continued the tradition of the painted 
 furniture of Morris and Company. Some work in 
 
 8 
 
stained glass was also done in time for the Great Ex- 
 hibition ; and for a year or two Morris designed 
 figure work as well as ornament. Some of his figures 
 were of great beauty, although he later spoke of them 
 slightingly. One little King Alfred is as bright as 
 an ivory carving, and three female figures designed 
 about this time were afterwards woven into a tapestry. 
 
 After this period Morris only arranged the colour 
 and added detailed ornaments to figure subjects de- 
 signed by Madox Brown and Burne-Jones. An enor- 
 mous body of work was produced in this way. Em- 
 broidery was also one of the arts to which Morris 
 devoted his earliest attention. The room at the Red 
 House in which the painted cupboard stood was 
 covered with coarsely-embroidered cloth hung as 
 tapestry. 
 
 We now come to the period of Morris’s designs 
 for wall papers and textiles. In the last Arts and 
 Crafts Exhibition the original drawings for many 
 of these were exhibited, together with a selection of 
 the finished products. These patterns stand alongside 
 of his illuminations, his tapestries, and his printing as 
 examples of the high prime of his power. 
 
 From first to last he must have made hundreds of 
 such designs ; these have been imitated all over 
 Europe and America, but they stand supreme in 
 modern pattern work, and will necessarily remain 
 supreme until as great a man as Morris again deals 
 with that manner of expression with his full force 
 as he did. Morris has told us again and again that 
 pattern, to him, did not mean a mere abstract arrange- 
 ment in line and colour ; it had to bring into our 
 rooms some reminder of the beauty and freshness of 
 nature, some message from the Earth Mother. Even 
 
 9 
 
the most formal of his works recalls to us the strong 
 growth of healthy vegetation, or the tangle of 
 thickets where birds sing and shy beasts hide. Others, 
 more directly, speak in ordered pattern-language, of 
 a flower-embroidered field ; of willow boughs seen 
 against the sky ; of intertwined jessamine and white- 
 thorn ; of roses climbing against a background of 
 yew ; of branching pomegranate, lemon and peach ; 
 of a rose-trellised arbour in a garden. 
 
 In these patterns the colour, fair and pure, is always 
 simply and effortlessly right. On the one side 
 nothing is mineral or acid, on the other nothing 
 is mawkish or morbid. Some of the patterns are 
 illuminated all over like stained glass ; in others, on 
 a quiet background, a fruit or bird’s neck glows with 
 colour like a Chinese lantern. Others have a sweet 
 mellowness and vegetable sappiness as if the cloths 
 were stained through and through with the juices of 
 flowers. 
 
 Then the drawing is clear, elegant and strong ; 
 nothing is loose or vague ; and, as in Morris’s written 
 work, so here, there is no finesse nor rhetoric of 
 design, but all is quiet, inevitable, and great-minded. 
 
 Time compels me to miss any reference to his 
 work in dyeing and weaving of stuffs, and to his 
 most exquisite work in writing and illuminating 
 which occupied him from 1870 to 1880. Carpet 
 and tapestry weaving were to follow in the eighties. 
 The first piece of tapestry on which he apprenticed 
 himself to himself was shown at the last exhibition 
 of Arts and Crafts. To produce this he had to 
 devise a suitable loom, and to dye the wools ; then 
 he set it up, and wove a piece all himself, from his 
 own design, mostly before his breakfasts. When 
 
 10 
 
done he may have been proud of it for a time, but 
 he soon hid it away, and it was never publicly 
 shown during his life. Two or three other tapestries 
 were designed by himself, and others in collaboration 
 with Burne-Jones. The series culminated in the 
 lovely “Nativity” of Exeter College, and in the 
 magnificent series of designs after the Morte d’Arthur. 
 
 The last art which Morris took up to regenerate 
 was the printing of books. He had made some 
 essays in this direction about 1870, but his work in 
 the Kelmscott press occupied the last six years of his 
 life. In himself explaining his aims, he says that 
 he had noticed that fifteenth century books were 
 “ always beautiful by force of the mere typography.” 
 We all of us know this now as a mere commonplace, 
 but ten years ago the most of us would have passed 
 such books over as merely interesting from the point 
 of view of history ; it needed the eye of a master 
 artist like Morris to see that they were intrinsically 
 beautiful — the perfect form of printed book. His 
 intention to deal with printing was fully confirmed 
 by Mr. Emery Walker’s lecture at the Arts and 
 Crafts in 1888. A few years later he was to lecture 
 there himself on the same subject, and I well 
 remember how on that occasion while telling us of 
 the perfect form of the old books, he remarked wist- 
 fully that he sometimes feared that with the march 
 of science, books might be abolished in favour of 
 some distilled essence of literature carried about in 
 bottles. 
 
 With Morris’s literature I shall not attempt to 
 deal. Its aim, given in his own words, was “ to em- 
 body dreams in a series of pictures” ; it is the written 
 complement of his designs, as clear, positive and noble 
 
as they. His stories, like the stained glass abbey-win- 
 dows which he describes in the “ Sundering Flood,” 
 are “ all as if done with gem stones ; and everywhere 
 the fair stories told as if they were verily alive ; and 
 as if they who did them had seen them going on in 
 the earth and in the heavens.” 
 
 A large body of his writings, however, deal tech- 
 nically and historically with the arts and crafts. 
 Amongst these, the little “ Gothic Architecture ” is, 
 I think, the best general account of the meaning of 
 that art which has ever been written. 
 
 With all Morris’s more technical writings is bound 
 up a philosophy of the relation of art to practical 
 life, and I shall conclude this part of my paper by 
 considering four main doctrines which seem to stand 
 out from the general body of his teaching. The first 
 clause in this gospel for to-day would be on the neces- 
 sity of reinventing our eyes, and on the immediately 
 consequent need for cleaning England. Nature and 
 Art speak directly to us through the eyes. What 
 they say cannot be strained through other people’s 
 intellects and bottled into word-arguments ; but they 
 speak languages simple, direct and universal to all 
 who have eyes to see and hearts to love. One of the 
 strangest phenomena of our time is the subjection of 
 our eyes. We ought not to see, merely as collecting 
 information, but also to read the essential truths 
 which have access to the spirit directly by the eye, 
 which is chief amongst what the old thinkers called 
 the five gates of the soul. It is interesting to find in 
 the writings of Diirer, whose mode of thought Morris 
 himself spoke of as “ Gothic in essence,” this asser- 
 tion : “ The sight is the noblest sense of man ; a thing 
 thou beholdest is easier of belief than that thou hear- 
 
 12 
 
est.” Morris saw that the spirit of man was shaped 
 by its environment of thought-suggesting material, 
 and that of all means of inspiration contact with pure 
 nature was the most necessary. The second propo- 
 sition is on the value of manual labour in training 
 man. Here again his attitude was the exact opposite 
 of modern ideals or prejudices. We are not to hide 
 away from labour, but gladly to accept it as the best 
 mode for the exercise of energy which is one with life. 
 It is Labour which best gives value to energy, and 
 contentment to rest. “ The reward of labour,” Morris 
 said, “ is life.” Education has come to mean, first of 
 all a knowledge of books. In “News from Nowhere,” 
 on the contrary, the booky people are rather apolo- 
 getic, and a book-learned man says of his craftsman- 
 friend, “ I know he looks upon me as rather a grinder, 
 and despises me for not being very deft with my 
 hands. From what I have read of nineteenth century 
 literature, it is clear to me that this is a kind of re- 
 venge for the stupidity of that day, which despised 
 everybody who could use his hands.” 
 
 Modern education appeared to Morris to be very 
 much of what Herbert Spencer calls a Ceremonial 
 Institution, a thing like a Chinese lady’s lame feet or 
 a Mandarin’s long nails, which are intended as evi- 
 dence that rich people have been made expensively 
 useless. Here again Morris returned to the mediaeval 
 ideal in which education was not one thing but many, 
 and a Master Weaver and Master Mason and Master 
 Tailor stood much on a par with the Doctor of letters. 
 In days to come when the Guilds shall again resume 
 their office and their power, we shall doubtless have 
 not only Doctors of Law and Medicine, but Doctors 
 of Carpentry, Smithing, and Baking. 
 
 *3 
 
The third point, in my rough attempt at summar- 
 ising Morris’s philosophy of art, is the view that the 
 office of art is to redeem labour from being a curse. 
 If labour is not sweetened by art, that is, made inter- 
 esting by thought and contrivance and pride in good 
 quality, it will brutalize those who deal with it. Not 
 only the dyer’s hand but the dyer’s soul is subdued to 
 that he works in. As Ruskin says : — “ Life without 
 industry is guilt, industry without art is brutality.” 
 
 One is now almost afraid of talk of art : the thing 
 has been so parodied, vulgarised and abused ; it smells 
 as it were of stuffy rooms, it is limp with foolish 
 trifling, and stodgy with pretence. It was not so 
 when Ruskin and Morris first made use of the word 
 to mean the elements of good quality, reasoned fit- 
 ness, and pleasantness in all work done by hand for 
 necessary service. Art to Morris was the spirit of 
 man put into the body of his labour ; the intrinsically 
 right principle in the making of things — Work 
 religion. Above all, and first of all, art is evidence of 
 seriousness. In his earliest essay on art, that on 
 Ruskin in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, he 
 lays down the principle that the aim of art like the 
 true aim of any other human power was “not to 
 amuse people but to make them brave and just and 
 loving men.” 
 
 “ What I mean by art ” he says, in what is pro- 
 bably the most suggestive definition of the word ever 
 attempted, “is some creation of man which appeals 
 to his emotions and his intellect by means of his 
 senses.” So far from its being at one with luxury it 
 has always been stifled by luxury. Art is that which 
 harmonises man’s work with nature, “ the ugly is 
 something degrading to our man-like qualities.” 
 
 1 4 
 
The fourth cardinal point of Morris’s teaching 
 may be described as a conscious love of and com- 
 munion with nature. Every attack on the beauty 
 and purity of nature is an injury to ourselves, for we 
 are not only dependent on nature, but a part of it, 
 and we cannot but suffer with her suffering. For the 
 view that nature is to be looked at from outside, and 
 that the earth is a mere convenient backyard for 
 manufacturers, and the refuse heaps of commercial- 
 ism, we shall have some day to substitute the reverent 
 knowledge that the earth is our larger body, a thing 
 not at all to be exhausted for profit. We shall 
 awaken to the fact that when we have sold our 
 inheritance for so many five pound notes there is 
 nothing left worth buying with the said five pound 
 notes. We must come to know that the world is 
 no more mere mine and midden but a home and a 
 heaven to be lived in and loved. 
 
 It was just the ordinary kindly earth, and the old 
 buildings it bears in its lap, which Morris loved with 
 a sort of Druid’s passion. Take this description of 
 England: — “The land is a little land; too much shut 
 up within the narrow seas, as it seems, to have much 
 space for swelling into hugeness ; there are no great 
 wastes overwhelming in their dreariness, no great soli- 
 tudes of forests, no terrible untrodden mountain-walls; 
 all is measured, mingled, varied, gliding easily one 
 thing into another ; little rivers, little plains, swelling 
 speedily-changing uplands, all beset with handsome 
 orderly trees ; little hills, little mountains, netted over 
 with the walls of sheepwalks ; all is little ; yet not 
 foolish and blank, but serious rather and abundant of 
 meaning for such as choose to seek it. It is neither 
 prison, nor palace, but a decent home.” 
 
 x 5 
 
In trying to draw out some practical points from a 
 survey of Morris’s art-life and teaching, I would men- 
 tion first how his wonderful diversity was founded on 
 intense concentration. His artistic life is divided up 
 into distinct periods during each of which he gave all 
 his force to the study and development of some parti- 
 cular art, as pattern printing, dyeing, carpet and 
 tapestry weaving, illumination, printing and so on. I 
 dare say you remember yourselves how steps in your 
 education, were it the study of mathematics, music, or 
 a language, were made at certain definite periods. The 
 mind’s processes, if I may say so, seem like chemical 
 or electrical processes, in which you go on adding 
 drop after drop, or making pass after pass, and all at 
 once something happens : the elements run together 
 or a spark is given off. After such a moment our 
 powers reach another stage ; but these moments only 
 come as a result of accumulated force and a certain 
 mental heat. While Morris was perfecting his print- 
 ing, for instance, in the last half-dozen years of his 
 life, he just lived and dreamt, read and talked, of 
 types, papers, bindings, borders, woodcuts ; his very 
 recreation was in collecting fine old examples of 
 typography. 
 
 His study was not only of the superficial look ot 
 things, but of their very elements and essence. When 
 the firm were first producing textiles, Morris was a 
 practical dyer ; when it was tapestry, he wove the 
 first piece with his own hand ; when he did illumina- 
 tion, he had to find a special vellum in Rome and 
 have a special gold beaten ; when he did printing, he 
 had to explore paper-making, ink-making, type-cut- 
 ting and other dozen branches of the trade. His 
 ornaments and the treatment of Burne-Jones’ illustra- 
 16 
 
tions were based on his personal practice as a wood- 
 cutter. Morris was no mere “ designer” of type and 
 ornament for books, but probably the most compe- 
 tent master book-maker ever known. Indeed it is a 
 mistake to get into the habit of thinking of him as a 
 designer; he was a work-master — Morris the Maker. 
 
 As to his conception of art, he thought of it as an 
 essential language. Just as there is gesture language 
 and speech language, so art, through the eye, like 
 music, through the ear, signals, as it were, by a code 
 of its own, ideas to the mind. 
 
 In his lecture “ Some hints on pattern design,” he 
 defined what he meant by patterning, as “the orna- 
 mentation of a surface by work that is not essentially 
 imitative or historical,” but yet an “ ornamentation 
 that reminds us of the earth, animals, and men,” and 
 so “sets our minds and memories at work.” “You 
 may be sure that any decoration is futile and has 
 fallen into at least the first stage of degradation when 
 it does not remind you of something beyond itself, 
 of somethiing of which it is but a visible symbol.” 
 This ornamental pattern-work (he says) “to be raised 
 above the contempt of reasonable men, must possess 
 three qualities : beauty, imagination, and order.” 
 Examining these three essentials, the need for beauty 
 is obvious; as for the second, imagination, “every work 
 of man which has beauty must have some meaning 
 in it also ; the presence of beauty implies that the 
 mind of the man who made it was lifted above com- 
 monplace, and that he had something to communicate 
 to his fellows.” Then comes a fine maxim “ Every 
 real work of art, even the humblest, is inimitable.” 
 Then as to the third of the essential qualities of deco- 
 rative art — order. This he says is at once a wall 
 
 l 7 
 
against vagueness and a door for the imagination ; and 
 this must be clear if you come to think of it. Give 
 an artist a piece of paper and say to him “ I want a 
 design,” and he must ask you “What for?” But if 
 you say, I want you to make such and such a pretty 
 thing out of these intractable materials, straightway 
 his invention will be quickened. It is “ this working 
 in materials which is the raison d'etre of all pattern 
 work. Every different material is the means by 
 which we may tell a story in a new way.” 
 
 As to construction and drawing, several of his lec- 
 tures contain invaluable hints. His structure was 
 invariably strong and springing, his drawing crisp 
 and clear. His favourite frameworks for repeating 
 patterns were formed on the branch, the network of 
 square lozenges or curved lozenges and a series of 
 strong scrolls spreading all over the surface. He chose 
 rather the simple and the obvious for ground work, 
 net striving against the rigid bonds of his materials 
 and methods, like those do who squeeze moonlit land- 
 scapes into repeating friezes. 
 
 On the other hand, he nearly always gave a certain 
 mystery to his ornamental work by the use of un- 
 derlays of smaller foliage, sub-patternings, or pow- 
 derings. An appearance of intricacy was one of the 
 effects that he nearly always brought into his patterns. 
 
 One of the most striking points to be observed in 
 his work by practical men is the amount of change 
 he could get out of a few elements in a mechanically 
 produced pattern. A single colour, for instance, may 
 be used in a piece of work, sometimes as spaces of 
 colour, sometimes as outline, and again as shading and 
 hatchings and dottings. Every contrivance of this 
 kind was at his fingers’ ends and he enjoyed its employ- 
 18 
 
ment. A friend once found him spotting the back- 
 ground of a design with dots, and asked why he did 
 not hand that mechanical work over to an assistant. 
 “ After taking all the trouble to draw it, do you think 
 I’d be such a fool as not to do the dots ? ” 
 
 Morris’s drawing is a wonderful combination ot 
 strength and sweetness. His patterns don’t look 
 drawn so much as grown. Everything is sharply 
 defined and vividly alive, bright and gay. Vagueness 
 was an artistic sin against which he was always 
 preaching. He seems to have seen the details of his 
 pattern work always as shape, never as outline. This 
 I think is a point to be noted, for from our habit 
 of outlining and then tinting in the areas between 
 the lines a certain strife springs up between the two 
 systems of line and space, and the relations are altered 
 so that what looked right in outline is wrong as 
 arrangement of colour areas. An outline drawn 
 clear and sharp is a thing that should show and be 
 judged on its merits, it does not do as a boundary 
 limiting, yet swallowed up in, the final tone or colour. 
 The proper boundary in such cases is the thing 
 found last, it is the ultimate finish of the form as 
 defined by brush strokes. Morris’s pattern work was 
 in the main the painting of shapes with a brush, it was 
 not tinting in the spaces defined by a rigid border. 
 Even when firm black lines following the pattern are 
 an essential part of the design, these are outlines 
 added as a final clearing, sharpening, and defining, 
 and as such they vary in width, and work in with 
 small areas of the defining colour. In the main, then, 
 Morris’s pattern work is made up of colour forms 
 designed with the brush, and doing it thus he could 
 modify his shapes right up to the moment of finish, 
 
 l 9 
 
thickening a branch, adding detail to unfilled spaces 
 and coaxing the edges of his leafage into finally 
 beautiful forms. Only in this way, I believe, can 
 harmony of scale, flow of form, and that look of just 
 rightness be obtained. In the past, of course, this was 
 the way in which most decorative work was done. 
 Letters were shapes written with a broad pen, or like 
 the Lombard capitals formed by the stroke of a brush, 
 and the relation of thicks to thins was not designed , it 
 made itself. The strength of old heraldry is partly to 
 be explained in this way. The charges were colour- 
 shapes, not outline drawings tinted. In stained glass 
 this is even more marked, and all good painted 
 pottery decoration you will find has developed under 
 the brush stroke. Our modern pattern work fails 
 very largely in this, that it is made up of pencil out- 
 lined shapes copied into colour areas. 
 
 To give a special instance, I have watched Mr. 
 Morris designing the black and white borders for his 
 books. He would have two saucers, one of Indian 
 ink the other of Chinese white. Then making the 
 slightest indications of the main stems, of the pattern 
 he had in his mind, with pencil, he would begin at 
 once his finished final ornament by covering a length 
 of ground with one brush and painting the pattern 
 with the other. If a part did not satisfy him the other 
 brush covered it up again, and again he set to to put 
 in his finished ornament. This procedure opens up 
 another idea of his, that a given piece of work was 
 best done once for all, and that all making of elaborate 
 cartoons, and then accurately copying into a clean 
 finished drawing was a mistake. There was not only 
 a loss of vitality which would come by the interposition 
 of more or less mechanical work, but a drawing would 
 
 20 
 
not come right a second time, and would always to his 
 eye bear the impress of a copy instead of a thing self- 
 springing under his hand. It is difficult to realise the 
 extent to which he felt this, but in his written work it 
 was exactly the same. He seemed to have the idea 
 that a harmonious piece of work needed to be the result 
 of one flow of mind ; like a bronze casting in which 
 all kinds of patching and adding are blemishes. If 
 in a lecture for instance he went over old ground, he 
 rarely re-edited by alterations and interpolations ; but 
 just wrote the whole thing over again from his head 
 and his heart. The actual drawing with the brush 
 was an agreeable sensation to him, the forms were led 
 along and bent over and rounded at the edges with 
 definite pleasure, they were stroked into place as it 
 were with a sensation like that of smoothing a cat. 
 Just the true painter’s gusto in fact : and thus he kept 
 alive every part of the work by growing the pattern as 
 I have said, bit by bit, solving the turns and twists as 
 he came to them. It was to express this sensuous 
 pleasure that he used to say that all good designing 
 work was felt in the stomach. 
 
 In coming to speak of Morris’s colour, I suppose, 
 if I would pass for a critic, I ought to say that it was 
 better or worse than his sense of form, but I don’t 
 really know, his form and his colour are both so far 
 beyond me that I can only admire and try to learn. 
 Even in the choice of single colours, reds, greens, 
 yellows, Morris’s mastery appears ; if it be kermes 
 and indigo in dyes, or red lead and yellow ochre in 
 pigments, he looked on these colours when pure as in 
 themselves beautiful natural products, the individu- 
 ality and flavour of which would be destroyed by too 
 much mixing. As the flavours of wine differ from 
 
 21 
 
one another, and as these would only be destroyed by 
 mixing sherry and port, hock and the rest, so the 
 natural perfection of pigments is more and more lost as 
 you mix them. You may reinforce colours by skilful 
 juxtaposition, but mixing is almost certain to be de- 
 gradation. The ideal of practical colouring is to 
 apply the pure pigment at once in its right place, 
 without even too much stirring with the brush : of 
 course this is not generally possible, but all mixing, 
 and all laying wash over wash, tends to lower colour 
 to mere dirt. A false idea of harmony there is, which 
 is very dangerous — the harmonising colour into a 
 general frowsy drab, the harmony of kamptulicon. 
 A nice story is told of Morris and of how a customer 
 who had got hold of him objected to the brightness 
 of colour in his things. “ I like this, Mr. Morris, 
 but I fear the colour is too bright for my room.” 
 “ This, too, is delightful, but I wish the colour were 
 more harmonious.” At last Morris opened the street 
 door and said, “ If it’s mud you want you will find 
 plenty out there.” 
 
 Although some of the most beautiful colour in the 
 world is low in tone, little more sometimes than vari- 
 ously tinted greys like the hues of a pearl, yet after 
 all colour is colour , and not its negation, and to learn 
 the possibilities of delicate gradations it is necessary 
 to have explored the possibilities of colours at their 
 central brightness. 
 
 Preconceived notions of there being specially “art 
 colours,” like peacock green or terra cotta red, are 
 ruinous to the acquisition of a colour sense. Beware, 
 too, Morris said in a Birmingham lecture, of aiming 
 too much at iridescence : “ It is apt to look like de- 
 composition.” The best way of developing a sense 
 
 22 
 
of colour would probably be to deal with a very 
 limited number of simple pure old-fashioned pigments 
 — a yellow, a red and a blue, with black, grey and 
 white, and then to experiment by laying pure patches 
 of each beside each in various relations of quantity and 
 intensity. The most casual examination of Morris’s 
 work shows his use of simple, pure hues, his relief of 
 dense colour by light tints, and his opposition of grey 
 to hot and brilliant colour. But to attempt to describe 
 the arrangements of colour made by him would almost 
 be as elusive a task as to describe the scent of flowers. 
 It was his aim so to play on the keyboard of colour 
 as to get harmonies true and pure as when bells chime 
 perfectly together. 
 
 THE GUILD PRESS, 45, GT. CHARLES STREET, BIRMINGHAM* 
 
 23 
 
THE ARTISTIC CRAFTS SERIES OF TECH- 
 NICAL HANDBOOKS EDITED BY W R 
 LETHABY. 
 
 No. I. BOOKBINDING, AND THE CARE OF 
 BOOKS, A TEXT-BOOK FOR BOOKBINDERS AND 
 LIBRARIANS. BY DOUGLAS COCKERELL. With 
 122 Diagrams and Illustrations by Noel Rooke, and 8 
 Collotype Reproductions of Bindings. 
 
 NOW READY. 342 Pages. Price 5s. net. 
 
 ’ “An excellent book opens ‘The Artistic Crafts Series of Technical 
 
 HpnrlHnrib-e 5 „ , 
 
 Handbooks.’ ” — Times . 
 
 . “ would be hard to find any technical book of this kind which 
 gives more importance to considerations of good taste than this. 
 
 It leaves no part of its subject unaccounted for. . . . Valuable in 
 
 itself, it promises well for the series which it opens.” — Scotsman, 
 
 THE FOLLOWING ARE IN ACTIVE PREPARATION : 
 
 GOLD AND SILVERSMITHS’ WORK. 
 
 By Mr. H. Wilson. 
 
 CABINET MAKING AND DESIGNING. 
 
 By Mr. C. Spooner. 
 
 WRITING AND ILLUMINATING. 
 
 By Mr. E. Johnston. 
 
 WITH OTHERS IN DUE COURSE. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY JOHN HOGG, 
 
 13 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.