Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/462

ÆT. 48] the last year of his life. The work was not interesting to him; it is arduous while it lasts, and the looking over large masses of thoroughly mediocre work was a severe trial to his patience. But he stuck to it for the sake of the good that might ultimately come of it; and in the latter years of his life he had the satisfaction of seeing, in London and elsewhere, noticeably at Birmingham, a real school of manual art slowly form itself whose work was directly aimed at practice.

One secret of the excellence of Morris's own designs was that he never designed anything which he did not know how to produce with his own hands. He had mastered the practical arts of dyeing and weaving before he began to produce designs for dyed and woven stuffs to be made in his workshops. "It is a thing to be deprecated," he says in his evidence before the Royal Commission, "that there should be a class of mere artists who furnish designs ready-made to what you may call the technical designers. I think it is desirable that the artist and what is technically called the designer should practically be one." But this is not all. "A designer ought to be able to weave himself. A man employs a designer to draw his patterns. One of two things happens: either the designer has learnt the method of execution in a totally perfunctory manner, and takes no interest in it, but goes only by a certain set of rules, and is therefore cramped and made dull and stupid by going by them: or on the other hand if, as sometimes happens, the manufacturer goes to a more dignified kind of artist, who, knowing nothing of the way in which the thing has to be done, produces a kind of puzzle for the manufacturer, the manufacturer having paid for it takes it away and does what he can with it, chops the