of Omar Khayyam, designed the Larkspur wallpaper, began his novel, and fiddled about in ‘a maze of re-writing and despondency’ with his elaborate masque, Love Is Enough. But the moral of Love Is Enough (as Shaw complained) is not that love is enough. Pharamond, coming back from his quest for an ideal woman to find that his kingdom has been usurped by a stronger man, accepts that frustration and loss are worthy—‘though the world be awaning’—to be called a victory in the name of love. But Morris knew, as Shaw knew, that this is nonsense. The victory, melancholy as it is, is for self-control. Renunciation is achieved through the will and strengthens the will, not the emotions. And this, with a far more positive hero than poor Pharamond, is, I believe, the real subject of the novel on blue paper.
Morris had been delicate as a child, but as soon as he grew into his full strength he was subject to fits of violent rage, possibly epileptic in origin. To what extent these were hereditary it is impossible to say. His father was said to be neurotic, and may well have clashed with his eldest son; when Morris was eleven he was sent as a boarder to his school at Woodford, although it was only a few hundred yards away from his home. What seems strange in his later life is the attitude of his close friends, who appear to have watched as a kind of entertainment his frenzied outbursts, followed by the struggle to control himself and a rapid childlike repentance. At times he would beat himself about the head in self-punishment. ‘He has been known to drive his head against a wall,’ Mackail wrote, ‘so as to make a deep dent in the plaster, and bite almost through the woodwork of a windowframe.’ Yet with the exception of the day when he hurled a fifteenth-century folio at one of his workmen, missing him but breaking a door panel, there is no record of his making a physical attack on anyone. To return to the student’s question, Morris did not strike anybody, least of all the ailing Rossetti, because he waged almost to the end of his life a battle for self-control.
The recognition of restraint as an absolute duty may be referred back to the tutor who prepared Morris, when he was seventeen years old, for his entrance to Oxford. This tutor, the Reverend F. B. Guy, was one of the faithful remnants of the Oxford Movement who had survived Newman’s conversion, or desertion, to Rome. Morris believed at this time that he was going to enter the Church, and could not fail to learn from Guy the Movement’s insistence on sacrifice and self-correction, even in the smallest things. The Tractarians saw the religious impulse not as a vague emotion, but as a silent discipline growing from the exercise of the will. All that we ought to ask, Keble had said, is room to deny ourselves. And Morris, willingly enlisted in a struggle that he was never to win, persisted in it long after he had parted from orthodox Christianity. At the age of twenty-three he concluded that he must not expect enjoyment from life—‘I have no right to it at all events—love and work, these two things only.’ In 1872, when love had betrayed or rejected him, he wrote: ‘O how I long to keep the world from narrowing on me, and to look at things bigly and kindly.’
The most telling expression of Keble’s doctrines in fiction was Charlotte M. Yonge’s Heir of Redclyffe (1853). It was said to be the novel most in demand by the officers wounded in the Crimean War, and it was the first book greatly to influence Morris. Here he read the family story of a tragic inheritance. Guy, the heir, has the ferocious temper of his Morville ancestors, and has to struggle as best he can with ‘the curse of sin and death.’ All his ‘animal spirits,’ all his great capacity for happiness is overshadowed by the temptation to anger, and he is driven to strange extremes, cutting up pencils, biting his lips till the blood runs down, and refusing, in obedience to a vow, even to watch a single game of billiards. ‘Resistance should be from within.’ He sees his whole life as ‘failing and resolving and failing again.’ Philip, on the other hand, the high-minded young officer, provokes the heir and leads him, from the best possible motives, into temptation. Here the novel sets out to show the evil that good can do, and when Guy dies to save him from fever, Philip is left to suffer forever ‘the penitence of the saints.’
The Heir of Redclyffe, as an exemplary text, asks for a kind of inner or even secret knowledge from its readers. From page to page we are reminded of Kenelm Digby’s Broadstone of Honour (1822—27), which held up the example of mediaeval chivalry to Young England. That is why Guy’s nearest railway station is called Broadstone. Again, Guy and his sweetheart Amy are, in a sense, acting out the story of Sintram (the book which Newman would only read when he was quite alone).2
Sintram, tempted by the world, the flesh, and the devil, and burdened by his father’s crime, has to toil upward through the snows to reach Verena, his saintly mother. That is why the widowed Amy calls her child Verena. And Sintram itself makes mysterious reference to its frontispiece, a woodcut version of Dürer’s engraving The Knight, Death, and the Devil, over which Morris and Burne-Jones, as students, had ‘pored for hours.’
These potent images remained with Morris, even though in The Earthly Paradise he had unlocked half the world’s tale-hoard. In the second of his late romances, for example, The Well at the World’s End (1892—93), Sintram’s evil dwarf reappears. In 1872, the time of his greatest emotional test and stress, he set to work on this novel that is a temptation story, although the hero must proceed simply on his own resolution, without prayer, without divine grace, without the saving hand of the loved woman. And, most unexpectedly, Morris returned from his dream-world, the ‘nameless cities in a distant sea,’ to place the story in a solid English parsonage, or, to be more accurate, in Elm House, Walthamstow, the first home that he could remember.
Morris opens his tale with the sins of the father. One of those impulses which ‘sometimes touch dull, or dulled, natures’—a distinction which Morris was always careful to make—arouses the train of memory in Parson Risley. Eleanor’s letters follow. The parson’s sin is not that he was Eleanor’s lover. This is shown clearly enough later in Mrs Mason’s reproach: ‘Mr Risley, if my husband likes to make love to every girl in the village, he has a full right to it, if I let him’—a remark that blends well with the ‘sweet-smelling abundant garden’ and the fertile melon beds. Risley’s guilt then, is not a matter of sexuality but a denial of it, firstly through cold cowardice in rejecting a woman ‘like the women in poetry, such people as I had never expected to meet,’ and secondly through his vile temper. These two aspects of his nature are his legacy to his sons.
The parsonage, as has been said, recalls the house in Walthamstow where Morris was born, and in the two boys, John and Arthur, he represents the opposing sides, as he understood them, of his own character. In some ways the brothers are alike or even identical. Both are romantically imaginative and given to dreaming their lives into ‘tales going on,’ both are fond of fishing (not a trivial matter to Morris), both, of course, love Clara, both dislike their father yet resemble him. ‘As to the looks of the lads, by the way, it would rather have puzzled anyone who had seen them to say why the little doctor should have said that either was not like his father. Some strange undercurrent of thought must have drawn it out of him, for they were obviously both very much like him.’ John, however, is manly, open, friendly, bird-and-weather-noticing; Arthur is a bookworm, and sickly. (‘Love of ease, dreaminess, sloth, sloppy goodnature,’ Morris said, ‘are what I chiefly accuse myself of.’). Arthur is ‘versed in archaeological lore,’ while John is in touch with earth and water—‘with a great sigh of enjoyment he seemed to gather the bliss of memory of many and many a summer afternoon into this one’—and yet, perversely, Arthur is to be the farmer and John the businessman.
From the guilty father John inherits anger, Arthur cowardice. John’s loss of temper alarms Arthur; ‘Are you in a rage with me? Why, do you know, your voice got something like Father’s in a rage.’ But just as Parson Risley fails to answer Eleanor’s letter, so Arthur conceals John’s.
John’s struggle for self-control is marked by very small incidents. Resistance, as The Heir of Redclyffe recognizes, must be from within. At the beginning of the day’s outing, when Clara greets Arthur tenderly, ‘they did not notice that John turned away to the horse’s head.’ At Ruddywell Court, when Arthur begins to do the talking and Clara is entranced, John ‘got rather silent.’ On the return to the farm, when Clara kisses Arthur, John is left ‘whistling in sturdy resolution to keep his