Passion Without Vocation

Morris's leading passion:  a "hatred of modern civilization"
Coalbrookdale by Night, Phillippe de Loutherbourg

Was William Morris possessed of that magical trait we hear so much about: passion? To understand the most popular definition of "passion" today, one needs only to read a cover letter. When a candidate writes, for example, “Good administrative practices are my passion”, or even “the study of history is my passion”, she wants to tell her potential employers that a specific thing is her vocation: don't worry, I will never get bored of the job and run off to start my own business or become a lobster fisherman in the Bahamas. If that's what passion is in the modern sense—a specific, directed, and reliable sort of vocation—then Morris was about as passionate as a piece of moldy bread.

But if by passion we mean a theme to one's life, a broad goal towards which all the many vocations are merely different paths, then Morris was passionate indeed. Later in his life Morris once said, “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.” Hypothetically, if he'd written this in a cover letter in late 1855 when he was applying to work at the office of G.E. Street, an architecture firm in Oxford, then he would never have gotten the job.

Indeed, perhaps they shouldn't have given it to him, as he'd only settled on architecture months before the beginning of the apprenticeship. For years previous to that, he'd been planning and training to enter the church. But he was so convincing about his new choice that he had many people in his life believing that architecture was his one true vocation. He wrote to his mother along those lines:

“If I were not to follow this occupation I in truth know not what I should follow with any chance of success, or hope of happiness in my work ... Perhaps you think that people will laugh at me, and call me purposeless and changeable; I have no doubt they will, but I in my turn will try to shame them, God being my helper, by steadiness and hard work. … but … I will by no means give up things I have thought of for the bettering of the world in so far as lies in me.”

Alas, architecture turned out to involve too much drudgery and exact drawing, so he switched to painting within a year, leaving G.E. Street in the dust. Was this a sign that Morris was changeable and purposeless, or was he simply seeking different types of work that suited his life's general theme, his life's passion? The latter seems most likely. After all, as he wrote to his mother, he had simple aims: “I do not hope to be great at all in anything, but perhaps I may reasonably hope to be happy in my work...”

After he failed to become a painter as well, this line from his mother's letter took on new meaning. He no longer wanted to work for decades at one thing, in order to become a decent architect or passable painter. He wanted to enjoy his work, and this he did, becoming eminently successful at many different things. He wrote poetry about the deep past, he wrote fantasy novels and Socialist lectures about the far future, and he designed fabrics and papers to beautify the present as much as possible. These projects seem scattered, but were in fact very focused. Every single one of them served one purpose: helping his fellow man to escape, or to improve, the ugliness and unfairness of Victorian civilization.  

"the sorrow that changed and changes my life"

Charles Eliot Norton in 1903

When Morris returned from Iceland in the fall of 1871, he wrote a long letter to his accomplished American friend, Charles Eliot Norton. Norton, a well-known editor*, had been in Italy with his wife Susan, but was now traveling North. Morris wrote: “Please give my kindest remembrances to Mrs. Norton and the rest of your party … I hope, but don't expect that you will enjoy Berlin—” **

Indeed Norton did not enjoy Berlin at all. In fact he never reached it, because in Dresden his wife died in childbirth. From that moment onwards, he was a changed man: his happiest times would now belong to the past.

Returning to the United States without his wife, he saw his country in a new light. He took no pleasure in coming home: the steamer journey across the ocean had just increased the “material distance between me and the best part of my life”, he wrote. The memories of his time in Italy had become “the secret treasure” of his life; his lonely existence in the US, by contrast, was bare. Perhaps this emotional dichotomy was what allowed him to make a cool, critical analysis of his home country, at a time when so many others were blindly patriotic.

A year after Susan's death, Norton wrote to Henry James in a reflective mode. His letter touched on the subject of the United States, and its relative greatness when compared with the rest of the world:

No doubt there is great & restless vivacity of mind, much brightness of surface; & certainly there are many virtues to be found, even in the newest & roughest sets (at least Bret Harte, our latest immortal, so assures us,)—and Cambridge is no doubt as near the centre of the earth as any place so far north can possibly be. But it is a barren & solitary earth,—and it would be a wretched and unworthy patriotism, or a mere love of paradox, or an unmanly timidity and self distrust, that would hinder one who has known the best, from saying distinctly, “this is not the best & will not in our time be the best.”

Before the tragedy, Norton had been a dear friend to Morris and his circle, but he was sometimes a bit neglected. Edward Burne-Jones wrote to Norton just before the disaster, apologizing for forgetting to write, and pointing out that Morris was just as negligent in writing: “He behaves as badly to you as I do—fifty-two times a year we say to each other 'Have you written to Norton?' ” ***

Although Norton changed after the disaster, his friendship with the circle became closer than ever, and he was clearly less neglected. Georgiana, Burne-Jones's wife, explained the shift: “from that time [Susan's death] our sympathy with her husband changed affection into devotion.'There was no need for you to be dearer to your friends,' Edward wrote to him, 'but you will be.' ”

*  His distinguished career as a Harvard Professor had not yet begun.

**  From letter #154 in The Collected Letters of William Morris, Vol. I, edited by Norman Kelvin.

***  See page 23 of linked text. Georgiana's quote can be found on page 27.

William Morris's Great Weakness

Morris's Oxford Union mural, How Sir Palomydes Loved La Belle Iseult with Exceeding
 Great Love out of Measure, and how She Loved Him Not Again but Rather Sir Tristram

Morris struggled with the figures in his mural.

In 1856, at the age of twenty-two, William Morris decided to become a painter. It's not a coincidence that this decision came after just a few months of friendship with one of his heroes, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. At the time, Rossetti had very forceful views, which placed painters above everyone else. According to a friend of his, he claimed that if “any man had poetry in him, he should paint it.” Morris found Rossetti's arguments irresistible, and by July he was writing: “Rossetti says I ought to paint... now as he is a very great man, and speaks with authority and not as the scribes, I must try...” He would never succeed, and his attempts would often drive him wild with frustration.

Very little evidence survives of Morris's long struggle with figure sketching and painting. Morris would be pleased with this situation: indeed, he probably destroyed many of his early works himself. The only canvas painting spared, La Belle Iseult, is good enough to suggest that he was a fine painter, but it was worked on by a number of Morris's friends, including Rossetti, after it left his hands. To Morris's dismay however, an unflattering example of his figure painting did survive, and can be seen to this day.

When Rossetti gathered a group of artists to paint murals in the new Oxford Union building in 1857, Morris agreed to do one of the panels. After being mocked for his figure of Iseult, who apparently looked like an “ogress”, Morris altered the painting, and covered over much of the panel with a twisting thicket of plants and sunflowers. The result was a huge swathe of green, with the rather crude faces of the lovers Tristram and Iseult peeping out in the upper right corner, and the jealous Sir Palomydes watching them from the left.

Morris was embarrassed by the result, writing twelve years later “I believe it has some merits as to colour, but I must confess I should feel much more comfortable if it had disappeared from the wall, as I'm conscious of it being extremely ludicrous in many ways.” When he wrote those words, his wish was coming true. The murals were fading rapidly, and were very difficult to see. It was only later that a restoration revealed the original in all of its awkward glory.

This experience pushed Morris ever closer to the decorative arts, for although he disliked his wall mural, he was very pleased with his ceiling design, a flowing pattern that was very capably done. Sadly, this pattern can't be seen any more, as Morris re-painted the ceiling to a new design in 1875.

If you haven't been to see the Oxford Union Murals, then watch this video prepared by Oxford Brookes University. It was filmed at night, so the murals—normally hard to see for all the sunlight—come out beautifully. They focus on a few of the murals, including Rossetti's and Morris's, while Dr. Christiana Payne and Nancy Langham discuss them.

Unattributed Morris quotes in today's post come from Norman Kelvin's The Collected Letters of William Morris, Vol I. 
The Ogress comment was made by Val Prinsep, and can be seen in Fiona MacCarthy's biography, William Morris: A Life for Our Time.
To read more about Morris's canvas painting, see Jan Marsh's article "La Belle Iseult" in the Summer 2011 edition of the Journal of William Morris Studies. (Vol XIX, Number 2)
There's also a master's thesis on the topic of the murals, here.

Morris and the Machine

The 1893 Chicago World's Fair Machinery Hall
via http://industrialartifactsreview.com/

Standing in the Machinery Hall of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, Henry Adams, Great-Grandson of the second President of the United States, suddenly realized that science and machinery had “electrocuted Santa Claus.” William Morris died in 1896, just three years after Adams's realization, and already there were signs that “the machine” was coming to dominate human minds and lives. Automobile development was blooming, H.G. Wells's Time Machine came out in 1895, and in 1896, a wireless telegraphic message (precursor to the radio), was successfully sent nearly nine miles across the Bristol channel.

It's easy to think that Morris wasn't ready for the 20th century; that it was somehow fitting for him to pass away before the next wave of technology engulfed the wealthy part of the world. After all, he'd spent most of his life battling the ugly effects of industrialization. He'd even said himself that the leading passion of his life, apart from a desire to make beautiful things, was a “hatred of modern civilisation.”

But he's often misunderstood in this sense. Although he had been among the first Victorians to decry the loss of old ways of life, he was more pragmatic about it than many of us realize. In his 1888 essay, “The Revival of Handicraft,” he gently mocked those who would have everything done by hand, without regard for the craftsmen doing the work: “it is not uncommon to hear regrets for the hand-labour in the fields, now fast disappearing from even backward districts of civilized countries. The scythe, the sickle, and even the flail are lamented over … although I must avow myself a sharer in the above-mentioned reactionary regrets, I must at the outset disclaim the mere aesthetic point of view which looks upon … the reaper, his work, his wife, and his dinner, as so many elements which compose a pretty tapestry hanging.”

He did think that machine labor was degrading, but he laid the blame for this at man's door, and pointed out (in another lecture) that machines could relieve degradation as well as create it: “I have spoken of machinery being used freely for releasing people from the more mechanical and repulsive part of necessary labour; and I know that to some ... machinery is particularly distasteful, and they will be apt to say you will never get your surroundings pleasant so long as you are surrounded by machinery. I don't quite admit that; it is the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays...”

These concessions were limited: his long-term hope was for the reign of Socialism, the simplification of life, and the limitation of machinery once again. But in the the short-term, he quite admitted that “as an instrument for forcing on us better conditions of life, it [machinery] has been, and for some time yet will be, indispensable.”  

A Drunken Promise to Tennyson

Portrait of Tennyson, by Millais.
A figure who inspired upstanding behavior...

William Morris's friend, William Allingham, was an Irish man of letters with a penchant for collecting famous friends. He was also a devoted keeper of diaries. As a result, his unfinished autobiography, "William Allingham, a Diary" is an amazing resource, sprinkled with tales of Morris, Rossetti, Carlyle, and Tennyson.

This is one of my favorite stories from the diary, a re-telling of a story that Tennyson had told Allingham:

I was at an hotel in Covent Garden, and went out one morning for a walk in the Piazza. A man met me, tolerably well-dressed but battered-looking. I never saw him before that I know of. He pulled off his hat and said, “Beg pardon, Mr. Tennyson, might I say a word to you?” I stopped. “I've been drunk for three days and I want to make a solemn promise to you, Mr Tennyson, that I won't do so any more.” I said that was a good resolve, and I hoped he would keep it. He said, “I promise you I will, Mr. Tennyson,” and added, “Might I shake your hand?” I shook hands with him, and he thanked me and went on his way.” 

One Good Thing to Come out of America

An Attack on a Galleon by Howard Pyle. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

This year, The Delaware Art Museum turns 100. Their excellent collection of Pre-Raphaelite art didn't join the museum until 1935, so the only works to fully celebrate the centennial this year are about a hundred pieces by a single artist: Howard Pyle. Pyle was an American illustrator, artist and author. His art formed the heart of the new “Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts” collection in 1912, after his grieving friends and students banded together to create an institution in his memory.

His illustrations for magazines and books were very well known in his lifetime, drawing praise from American and European artists alike. Vincent Van Gogh was especially taken with his drawings of an old-time Quaker village in Harper's Magazine in 1881, which he thought “astounding”.

Pyle is perhaps best known for his collection of tales, “The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood”, which was published in 1883. Although the story of Robin Hood dates from the medieval period, and had been partially treated by the famous author Sir Walter Scott, Pyle's book was entirely devoted to the outlaw, one of the earliest books to do so in a popular fashion. It was a hit.*

The book even reached England, and found its way into the discerning hands of William Morris. It was right up Morris's street, and not just because of its sympathetic treatment of the tales. Pyle had carefully designed the whole book, which included flourishes of medieval manuscript motifs and sixty-one of this own illustrations. According to art critic Joseph Pennell, Morris had “thought up to that time [that] … nothing good artistically could come out of America." Pyle's beautiful, Romantic book changed Morris's opinion: he was “impressed greatly”.

So when I say Happy 100^th birthday to the Delaware Art Museum, I mean to say happy birthday as well to the seed of its collection: Pyle's swashbuckling, adventuresome illustrations and paintings.

*No such luck for many others, including John B. Marsh's version from 1865.

Life is Fun! Grow Tall!

Bradbury in 1975 (Photo by Alan Light)

In honor of Ray Bradbury, who passed away on Tuesday night at the age of 91, I thought I'd share a clip from his Paris Review interview from 2010:

“That’s what we have to do for everyone, give the gift of life with our books. Say to a girl or boy at age ten, Hey, life is fun! Grow tall! I’ve talked to more biochemists and more astronomers and technologists in various fields, who, when they were ten years old, fell in love with John Carter and Tarzan and decided to become something romantic. Burroughs put us on the moon. All the technologists read Burroughs. I was once at Caltech with a whole bunch of scientists and they all admitted it. Two leading astronomers—one from Cornell, the other from Caltech—came out and said, Yeah, that’s why we became astronomers. We wanted to see Mars more closely.

I find this in most fields. The need for romance is constant, and again, it’s pooh-poohed by intellectuals. As a result they’re going to stunt their kids. You can’t kill a dream. Social obligation has to come from living with some sense of style, high adventure, and romance.”

Morris would have agreed heartily. As a boy, he learned the romance of life from Sir Walter Scott's novels like Ivanhoe and Waverley. That excitement and love of the world drove him to become a Socialist and an activist, and to beautify his surroundings with his design firm. It also drove him to write his own fantastical stories, inspiring younger writers like J.R.R. Tolkien.

The gift continues to be passed down in an unbroken chain. Bradbury is a part of this, which means that he achieved one of his most ambitious goals: when he was twelve, he decided that he would never die. In a very important sense, he hasn't.