Review: The Life of William Morris

The Life of William Morris by J.W. Mackail
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On the western banks of the Mississippi River, southwest of Baton Rouge and northwest of New Orleans, stands a stunning and truly awe-inspiring Greek and Italianate style “White Castle”. This is Nottoway Plantation, the South’s largest antebellum mansion, and now a resort. Completed in 1859, when William Morris was 26. Relating to Morris' age is easy since this massive biography ( The Life of William Morris Volume 1 & The Life of William Morris; Volume 2 ) in one volume ) includes the year and his age at the top of every page; a feature every such thorough life story should have. Anyway, a few years back I stayed at Nottoway and enjoyed very much their William Morris Woodpecker Tapestry.

‘I once a king and chief now am the tree bark’s thief
ever twixt trunk and leaf chasing the prey’. (1885)

This piece was designed by William Morris. The image was inspired by the Roman poet Ovid's story of Picus; an Italian King that was turned into a woodpecker by a sorceress after refusing to become her lover. I know of the Morris chair then - a mere footnote in this accomplished life I have now learned - and I was fascinated by the breadth of talent and execution suggested by the tapestry and chair. Now I have read of this life where the opportunity to freedom given by an inherited copper mine Morris took to indulge in education, literature, poetry, language, writing, designing, building preservation, font design, Socialist rabble-rousing, and more.

This life is told largely through "Topsy"'s own words and those of his intimates through correspondence and other primary sources. The passion of his belief in the quality of life enabled by functional art comes through in his own voice: "Time was when everybody that made anything made a work of art besides a useful piece of goods, and it gave them pleasure to make it. Whatever I doubt, I have no doubt of that." (1881)

In his "Antiscrape" movement he sought to preserve buildings, etc. as they were - not with the adulteration of "restoration". Here again, he waxes eloquent as well as fervent:
It [Westminster Abbey] was the work of the inseparable will of a body of men, who worked as they lived, because they could do no otherwise, and unless you can bring those men back from the dead, you cannot "restore" one verse of their epic. Rewrite the lost trilogies of Aeschylus, put a beginning and end to the "Fight at Finsbury," finish the Squire's tale for Chaucer, even if you cannot

"call up him that left half-told
The story of Cambuscan bold,"

and if you can succeed in that, you may then "restore" Westminster Abbey. This quote is preserved up at Marxists.org as also a testament to his ardent socialism that he promoted and poured so much of his energy into.

In his "Antiscrape" movement he sought to preserve buildings, etc. as they were - not with the adulteration of "restoration". It was not only historical monuments that aroused his intensity. His biographer tells us of his passionate philosophy of the home: "To him the House Beautiful represented the visible form of life itself. Not only as a craftsman and manufacturer, a worker in dyed stuffs and textiles and glass, a pattern designer and decorator, but throughout the whole range of life, he was from first to last the architect, the master-craftsman, whose range of work was so phenomenal and his sudden transitions from one to another form of productive energy so swift and perplexing because, himself secure in the centre, he struck outwards to any point on the circumference with equal directness, with equal precision, unperplexed by artificial subdivisions of art, and untrammelled by any limiting rules of professional custom."

This view and his considered station in life wedded with his socialistic concern for the working man: "Over and over again have I asked myself why should not my lot be the common lot. My work is simple work enough; much of it, nor that the least, pleasant, any man of decent intelligence could do. ... Indeed I hae been ashamed when I have thought of the contrast between my happy working hours and the unpraised, unrewarded, monotonous drudgery which most men are condemned to. Nothing shall convince me that such laour as this is good or necessary to civilization.”

A philosopher-king of art and design.



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