must understand this if we are to understand Morris’s early passion for the Middle Ages and all their works. It was not the dry passion of the mere archaeologist who studies the past because it is dead. Morris studied it because he saw it alive. The churches for him were not old, but just built. It was the later buildings of what he called the age of ignorance that to him seemed obsolete, for they expressed nothing that he wanted. Just as the minds of the great artists of the Renaissance leapt back over an intervening time to classical art, so his mind leapt back to the Gothic and found in it the new world that he wished to create.
At the age of thirteen he was sent to Marlborough College, then a new school and lax in its discipline. This was a piece of good fortune for him, for he did not need to be set either to work or to play. He was not an aimless idler, to be kept out of mischief by compulsory games. At Marlborough he had another forest, to roam through and a library of books to read. He had not been taught any craft in childhood; but his fingers were as busy as his mind; and for want of some better employment he exercised them in endless netting, as he exercised his mind by telling endless tales of adventure to his schoolmates. At Marlborough he became aware of the High Church Movement and was drawn into it, so that when he left the school knowing, as he said, most of what was to be known about English Gothic, he went to Exeter College, Oxford with the intention of taking Orders.
15. Violet and Columbine, 1883. Pattern for woven textile. Private collection.
16. Rose (detail), 1883. Pencil, pen, ink and watercolour on paper, 90.6 × 66.3 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
17. Cray, 1884. Printed cotton, 96.5 × 107.9 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
18. Wandle, 1884. Indigo-discharged and block-printed cotton, 160.1 × 96.5 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
This was in the Lent term of 1853; and while at Oxford he continued to educate himself much as he had done at school. At Exeter, we are told, there was then neither teaching nor discipline Morris’s tutor described him as a rather rough unpolished youth who exhibited no special literary tastes nor capacity, from which we may guess that they were not close friends. Indeed Morris all his life used the word don as a term of abuse more severe than many strong-sounding words at his command. But Oxford itself, still unblemished in its beauty, delighted him; and he got from it his first notion of what a city should be. Yet it seemed to him a misused treasure of the past, for already he desired a present capable of expressing itself with the same energy and beauty. The present of Oxford seemed to him a mere barbarism, frivolous and pedantic; but for one friend whom he made in his first term, he might have lived a lonely life there. This friend was Edward Burne-Jones, a freshman from King Edward’s Grammar School, Birmingham, who already promised much as an artist, but who, like Morris, meant to take Orders. Neither of them cared much for the undergraduates of Exeter; but there were some of Burne-Jones’s schoolfellows at Pembroke to whom he introduced Morris, and among whom Morris got the society he needed. Canon Dixon, the poet, who was one of these, tells us that at first they regarded Morris simply as a pleasant boy who was fond of talking, which he did in a husky shout:
“He was very fond of sailing a boat. He was also exceedingly fond of single-stick and a good fencer… But his mental qualities, his intellect also, began to be perceived and acknowledged. I remember Faulkner remarking to me, ‘How Morris seems to know things, doesn’t he?’ And then it struck me that it was so. I observed how decisive he was: how accurate, without any effort or formality. What an extraordinary power of observation lay at the base of his casual or incidental remarks, and how many things he knew that were quite out of our way, as, for example architecture.”
In this new world of people and things and ideas Morris was not bewildered or misled by momentary influences. Then, as afterwards, he seemed to know by instinct what he wanted to learn and where he could find it. He had a scent for his own future, little as he knew yet what it was to be; and whatever he did or read was a preparation for it. Already there had begun in England that reaction against all the ideas of our industrial civilisation which Morris himself was to carry further than any. But the ideas were still predominant and were commonly supposed to have a scientific consistency and truth against which only wilfulness could rebel. Yet there was this curious inconsistency in them – that, while they recommended a certain course of action to society which it was to adopt of its own free will, they promised as the mechanical result of that action a state of moral and material well-being to which society would attain without further effort. The will was to make its choice at the start; and then no further choice would be required of it. But this inconsistency was also based upon certain assumptions that do not now seem to us beyond dispute. It was assumed, for instance, that the main end of every society was to become rich; and that it would become rich if individuals were allowed to acquire riches by any means they chose to employ. This license was called freedom; and indeed it meant a complete freedom for those who were rich already, but a freedom merely nominal and legal for those who were poor. They were free to be rich if they could; but the great mass of them could not, and remained in extreme poverty, in spite or rather because of the riches of the few. Thus the national well-being promised did not come about, although great fortunes were made; and the moral well being also failed to equal expectations. Indeed there was an inconsistency between the morality of the individual and the morality of society that was bad for both. The morality of the individual was still supposed to be Christian, except when he was making money. But, as soon as he began to do that he was regarded as a member of a society whose aim only was to make money. Then his Christian morality was superseded by an economic law against which it was merely sentimental to rebel. This kind of inconsistency has always existed; but it has never been so glaring or produced so much moral and intellectual confusion as in England in the nineteenth century. Then it was that we established our reputation as a nation of hypocrites and were confirmed in our national dislike of logic. The great mass of Englishmen wished to be good, according to the Christian pattern; but they also wished to make money and they acquired a notion, implied in their laws and in their habits of thought if never openly stated, that money was the material reward of goodness. But this notion was always proving itself to be untrue. The rich were not identical with the good according to any system of morality known to man, least of all according to the Christian. Yet they were favoured and encouraged by all the laws, and by all the anarchy, of the State. If any one pointed out this inconsistency, he was told that the State, having made its wise choice in favour of riches, had no further choice in the matter. Scientific laws were now operating in favour of the rich and against the poor, and they were no more to be resisted than the law of gravity.
19. Rose, 1877. Colours prints from woodblocks. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Meanwhile certain people asked themselves how they liked this society, which was settling into a second state of nature; they found that they did not like it at all. Carlyle, for instance, disliked it as much as Jonah disliked Nineveh. In particular he disliked the rich because they were sheltered against reality by the whole structure of society, and because in their shelter they talked and thought about unreal things. He was as sure as Jonah that God in his wrath would some day blow all their comfort away from them; but he had no notion of a civilisation to take the place of that which he wished to destroy, nor of a peace of mind to succeed the complacent torpor against which he raged. His aim was to reduce the minds of men to the first stage of conversion, to that utter humiliation in which they might hear the sudden voice of God. We are used to his denunciations; but to Morris they were new and they assured him that he was right in his own instinctive dislike of all that Carlyle denounced.
As previously mentioned, Ruskin’s rebellion was at first æsthetic; it was a rebellion not merely against the art of his own time, but against all the art of the Renaissance and the ideas expressed in that art. The Stones of Venice was published in Morris’s first year at Oxford; and from the chapter on the Nature of Gothic he learnt that there was reason in his own love of Gothic and dislike of Renaissance architecture. Ruskin points out that in Gothic every workman