William Morris. Arthur Clutton-Brock

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      The Influence of Rossetti

      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:

      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 СКАЧАТЬ