Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/214

 position of his longest poem, the epic of 'Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs.' This was published at the end of 1876. Morris himself thought it his highest, if not his best, work in poetry. In it the influence of the north is seen at its height, and for the time has expelled, or driven below the surface, his romantic mediævalism and all traces of the Chaucerian manner. Here as elsewhere he owed little to English predecessors or contemporaries. His inspiration was drawn directly from the northern epics of the tenth to twelfth centuries, where it did not derive from models still more ancient and more universal; and the 'Sigurd' is at once the most largely and powerfully modelled of all Morris's poetical works, and the poem which approximates most nearly to the Homeric spirit and manner of all European posms since the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey.'

During the period of the composition of 'Sigurd the Volsung' Morris had taken up, with his customary vehement thoroughness, the practical art of dyeing as a necessary adjunct of his manufacturing business. He spent much of his time at Staffordshire dye works in mastering all the processes of that art and making experiments in the revival of old or discovery of new methods. One result of these experiments was to reinstate indigo-dyeing as a practical industry, and generally to renew the use of those vegetable dyes which had been driven almost out of use by the anilines. Dyeing of wools, silks, and cottons was the necessary preliminary to what he had much at heart, the production of woven and printed stuff', of the highest excellence; and the period (1875-6) of incessant work at the dye-vat was followed by a period during which (1877-8) he was absorbed in the production of textiles, and more especially in the revival of carpet-weaving as a fine art. Amid these manifold labours he was also taking more and more part in public affairs. From 1876 onwards be was an officer and one of the most active members of the Eastern Question Association. In 1877 he founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. In 1879 he became treasurer of the National Liberal League. In these years he began the practice of giving lectures and addresses (at first chiefly to working designers and art students), which remained afterwards one of his main occupations. The work of the firm, partly in consequence of the new departures now taken, partly from a wider knowledge and greater appreciation of its products, was steadily expanding. The premises at Queen Square had already become too small for it. Morris and his family had been driven out in 1872 that the whole house might be utilised for workrooms (he then lived first at Turnham Green, and from 1878 for the rest of his life on the Upper Mall of Hammersmith), and in 1881 the establishment was removed to large premises at Merton Abbey near Wimbledon, a sale-room and counting-house having been already set up in Oxford Street in the West End of London.

Since the completion of the 'Sigurd,' Morris's production in creative literature had almost ceased. Only a few months after its publication he had declined to be put in nomination for the professorship of poetry at Oxford, and since then his life had been more and more that of a manufacturer and a man keenly interested in public affairs, and less that of a man of letters and artist. In 1882 a combination of convergent causes profoundly altered his political attachments and his attitude towards politics. His enthusiasm for liberalism, after many severe checks from the whiggery of his party leaders, had been converted into open disgust by the Irish coercive legislation of 1881 and the timidity or aversion with which the liberal government regarded his favourite projects of social reform. Looking back in his forty-ninth year over what he had done and what he had failed to do, and looking to the future in the light of the past, he found himself forced reluctantly to the conclusion that hitherto he had not gone to the root of the matter; that, art being a function of life, sound art was impossible except where life was organised under sound conditions; that the tendency of what is called civilisation since the great industrial revolution had been to dehumanise life; and that the only hope for the future was, if that were yet possible, to reconstitute society on a new basis.

The Democratic Federation—a league of London working men's radical clubs with leanings towards state-socialism—was the only organisation at hand which seemed to Morris, from this point of view, to be at work in the right direction. In the belief that better conditions of life for the working class which substantially included the objects towards which that body worked were the necessary first step towards all further progress, and that they could be attained by properly organised action on the part of the working class itself, Morris joined the federation in January 1883. He had a few days before been elected an honorary fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. The doctrine of the federation rapidly developed within that year