II

WILLIAM MORRIS-POET, SOCIALIST, AND MASTER OF MANY CRAFTS

COULD that blithe old singer of the "breathing morn," from his pleasant "lodge within a park," come stepping briskly along our noisy nineteenth-century ways, bringing with him the scent of English fields, and notes of mavis and of merle-could Geoffrey Chaucer with ruddy cheeks, kindly eyes, and pointed beard, his flowing locks surmounted by a sheepskin cap, appear suddenly to our weary eyes with all the buoyancy of his own fresh day-even outwardly he might not differ greatly from that virile and sturdy figure which, to the present generation, has been known as William Morris. As story-tellers Geoffrey Chaucer and William Morris are akin. Ancient Woodstock and modern Kelmscott meet where these minstrels chant. Although in art Chaucer and Morris are closely related,

in the products of their pens they are notably dissimilar.

William Morris was of Welsh extraction. He was the eldest son of his parents, and was born in the village of Walthamstow, Essex, on March 24, 1834. He himself says in News from Nowhere: "I was born and bred on the edge of Epping Forest, Walthamstow and Woodford, to wit. . . . A pretty place, too, a very jolly place, now that the trees have had time to grow again since the great clearing of houses in 1855.” In the same work he speaks of the lovely river Lee, "where old Izaak Walton used to fish about the places called Stratford and Old Ford." In a letter to The Daily Chronicle he says of Epping Forest: "When I was a boy and young man I knew it yard by yard from Wanstead to the Theydons, and from Hale End to Fairlop Oak. In those days it had no worse foes than the gravel stealer and the robbing fence-maker, and was always interesting and often very beautiful."

Morris's artistic sense developed early.

It is recorded that as a boy of nine years, with a pony of his own, he rode half Essex over in search of old churches. So deep an impression did the results of these researches make upon his mind that, after an interval of many years, he could remember the details of a building which he had not seen since his boyhood. It was from Sir Walter Scott that Morris imbibed his first taste for art and romance. At the early age of seven he had read nearly, if not quite, all of Scott's works; and it was the "Wizard of the North" who taught him the love of Gothic architecture. He says:

How well I remember as a boy my first acquaintance with a room hung with faded greenery at Queen Elizabeth's Lodge, by Chingford Hatch, in Epping Forest, and the impression of romance it made upon me! A feeling that always comes back to me when I read, as I often do, Sir Walter Scott's Antiquary, and come to the description of the green room at Monkbarns, amongst which the novelist has with such exquisite cunning of art imbedded the fresh and glittering verses of the summer poet Chaucer.

Morris was educated at Marlborough under clerical masters, against whom, he re

marks, he naturally rebelled. The loose discipline of the place allowed him full scope for the cultivation of his individual tastes and pursuits. He was not more than fourteen years of age when the first general appearance took place, before the public, of the Preraphaelites, the radical doctrine of whom was naturalism as distinguished from realism. But the time was not yet ripe for Morris to come under their influence, nor was he ever formally enrolled in their ranks. Says Aymer Vallance:

It is, therefore, a supreme achievement of William Morris to have brought art, through the medium of the handicrafts, within reach of thousands who could never hope to obtain but a transitory view of Preraphaelite pictures; his distinction, by decorating the less pretending, but not less necessary, articles of household furnishing, to have done more than any other man in the present century to beautify the plain, everyday home life of the people.

On the second of June, 1852, Morris matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford. This was an event of first-rate importance in his life. Edward Burne-Jones matriculated on the same day at the same college.