Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/212

 taking a degree in order to begin life as a painter in London. The influence of Rossetti was immensely strong on both ; and when Morris also came to London and shared rooms with Burne-Jones, Rossetti succeeded in convincing him that he too ought to be a painter. Towards the end of the year he quitted Street's office, took a studio for himself and Burne-Jones at 17 Red Lion Square, Holborn, and plunged at the beginning of 1857 into a new life.

He had already proved his powers in imaginative literature. The faculty of story-telling he had possessed even as a schoolboy ; and at Oxford he had found that story-writing came to him just as easily. About the same time he had begun to write lyrical poetry ; his first attempts being marked (together with many mannerisms and immaturities) by an originality and power rare in any beginner. 'The Willow and the Red Cliff,' the first piece of verse he ever wrote, has, except for a few echoes of Tennysonian phrase, nothing in it that is not wholly Morris's own, and shows a directness of spiritual vision comparable to that of Blake. To this and the other pieces belonging to the same year, Chatterton may offer the nearest English parallel; and neither Keats nor Tennyson (Morris's two master poets among the moderns) had shown a more certain voice in their first essays in poetry.

Morris was one of the originators of the celebrated 'Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,' which was conducted and written by the members of the brotherhood and some of their friends, and paid for by him, during the twelve months of 1856. He contributed to it eight prose tales (of which 'The Hollow Land' is the most remarkable), one or two essays and reviews, and five poems, including the 'Summer Dawn,' which many critics would place among the first rank of lyrics of the imagination. When he began life as a painter he did not abandon poetry, and during 1857 wrote, besides a number of pieces which he afterwards destroyed, and others of which only fragments survive, most of the poems published by him in March 1858 in the volume entitled 'The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems.' Poetry, however, was now only his relaxation (as in a sense it always afterwards continued to be), and his regular work was drawing, painting in oil and water-colour, modelling, illuminating, and designing. During the last three months of 1857 he was working, together with Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Hughes, Pollen, Prinsep, and Stanhope, on the celebrated tempera decorations of the walls and roof of the newly built debating hall of the Oxford Union Society. He painted one of the ten bays of the walls, and designed, and executed with some help from friends, the ornamentation of the whole roof. While engaged on this work at Oxford he made the acquaintance of the lady whom he afterwards (26 April 1859) married, Miss Jane Burden.

For several years after his marriage Morris was absorbed in two intimately connected occupations : the building and decoration of a house for himself, and the foundation of a firm of decorators who were also artists, with the view of reinstating decoration, down to its smallest details, as one of the fine arts. Meanwhile he was practising less and less the specific form of decoration known as painting ; the latest of the few pictures painted by him do not go beyond 1862. The house he made for himself was the first serious attempt made in this country in the present age to apply art throughout to the practical objects of common life. It was built, from designs jointly framed by Morris and Webb (the latter being the responsible architect), at Upton in Kent ; it is still extant, though in greatly changed surroundings, with a considerable amount of its decoration, under its original name of Red House, given to it when the use of red brick without stucco was a startling novelty in domestic architecture. Its requirements, and the problems it suggested, had a large share in leading to the formation, in April 1861, of the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co., manufacturers and decorators, and to the whole of Morris's subsequent professional life. Rossetti, Burue-Jones, Madox Brown, and Webb were Morris's partners in the firm, together with C. J. Faulkner and P. P. Marshall, the former of whom was a member of the Oxford Brotherhood, and the latter a friend of Brown and Rossetti. The decoration of churches was from the first an important part of the business. On its non-ecclesiastical side it gradually was extended to include, besides painted windows and mural decoration, furniture, metal, and glass wares, cloth and paper wall-hangings, embroideries, jewellery, printed cottons, woven and knotted carpets, silk damasks, and tapestries. The first headquarters of the firm were at 8 Red Lion Square. The work shown by it at the Exhibition of 1862 attracted much notice, and within a few years it was doing a pretty large business. In the autumn of 1864 a severe illness obliged Morris to choose between giving up his home in Kent and giving up his work in London. With great reluctance he did the former, and in 1865 established himself,