Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/216

 duced : (3) various smaller books, originals or translations, including a series of stories translated by Morris from mediæval French. These, with a full account of the inception and working of the Kelmscott Press, are set forth in a history of the Press by Morris's secretary, Mr. S. C. Cockerell, which was the last book issued from it (1898).

During these years Morris also took an active part in various movements towards organising guilds of designers and decorative workmen, and continued to write and speak on behalf of the principles of socialism with no loss of conviction or enthusiasm. He also formed, with special relation to his work as a printer, a collection of early printed books, and, a little later, another of illuminated manuscripts of the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries ; both of these were at his death among the choicest collections existing in private ownership. On the death of Tennyson in 1894 the question of Morris's succession to the laureateship was entertained by the government, but was laid aside on an expression being obtained from him of his own disinclination for such an office. In 1895 his health began to give way under the strain of a crowded and exhausting life. When the magnificent Kelmscott Chaucer was finished in June 1896 he had sunk into very feeble health, and he died at Hammersmith on 3 Oct. in that year. His widow and two daughters survived him.

Morris was a singular instance of a man of immense industry and force of character, whose whole life, through a long period of manifold activity and multiform production, was guided by a very few simple ideas. His rapid movements from one form of productive energy to another often gave occasion for perplexity to his friends as well as for satire from his opponents. But in fact all these varying energies were directed towards a single object, the re-integration of human life ; and he practised so many arts because to him art was a single thing. Just so his work, in whatever field, while it expressed his own ideas with complete sincerity, bears an aspect of mediævalism, because it was all produced in relation to a single doctrine: that civilisation had ever since the break-up of the middle ages been, upon the whole, on a wrong course, and that in the specific arts as well as in the general conduct of life it was necessary to go back to the middle ages, not with the view of remaining at the point which had been then reached, but of starting afresh from that point and tracing out the path that had been missed. So long as any human industry existed which had once been exercised as an art in the full sense, and had now become mechanical or commercial, so long Morris would instinctively have passed from one to another, tracing back each to its source, and attempting to reconstitute each as a real art so far as the conditions of the modern world permitted. When he became a socialist, it was because he had realised that these existing conditions were stronger than any individual genius or any private co-operation, and that towards a new birth of art a new kind of life was necessary. To gain the whole he was willing for a time to give up the parts. When convinced by experience that the whole was for his own generation unattainable, he resumed his work on specific arts, to use his own words, ' because he could not help it, and would be miserable if he were not doing it.'

The fame of Morris during his life was probably somewhat obscured by the variety of his accomplishments. In all his work after he reached mature life there is a marked absence of extravagance, of display, of superficial cleverness or effectiveness, and an equally marked sense of composition and subordination. Thus his poetry is singularly devoid of striking lines or phrases, and his wall-papers and chintzes only reveal their full excellence by the lastingness of the satisfaction they give. His genius as a pattern-designer is allowed by all qualified judges to have been unequalled. This, if anything, he himself regarded as his specific profession ; it was under the designation of 'designer' that he enrolled himself in the socialist ranks and claimed a position as one of the working class. And it is the quality of design which, together with a certain fluent ease, distinguishes his work in literature as well as in industrial art. It is yet too early to forecast what permanent place he may hold among English poets. 'The Defence of Guenevere' had a deep influence on a very limited audience. With 'Jason' and the 'Earthly Paradise' he attained a wide popularity: and these poems, appearing as they did at a time when the poetic art in England seemed narrowing into mere labour on a thrice-ploughed field, not only gave a new scope, range, and flexibility to English rhymed verse, but recovered for narrative poetry a place among the foremost kinds of the art. A certain diffuseness of style may seem to be against their permanent life, so far as it is not compensated by a uniform wholesomeness and sweetness which indeed marks all Morris's work. In 'Sigurd the Volsung' Morris appears to have aimed higher than in his other poems, but not to have reached his