by Morris, but after the issue of No. 1 he resigned the formal
editorship to his friend Fulford. Many distinguished compositions
appeared in its pages, but it gradually languished, and
was given up after a year’s experiment. The chief immediate
result was the friendship between Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(q.v.), which sprang up from a successful attempt to
secure Rossetti as a contributor. In the summer of 1856 Street
removed to London, and Morris accompanied him, working very
hard both in and out of office hours at architecture and painting.
But Rossetti persuaded him that he was better suited for a
painter, and after a while he devoted himself exclusively to that
branch of art. It was in the summer that the two friends visited
Oxford, and finding the new Union debating-hall in course of
construction, offered to paint the bays. Seven artists volunteered
help, and the Work was hastily begun. Morris worked
with feverish energy, and on finishing the portion assigned to
him proceeded to decorate the roof. The work was done too
soon and too fast, the colours began to fade at once, and are now
barely decipherable; but the broken designs, so long as any
vestige remains, will always be interesting as a relic of an important
aesthetic movement and as the first attempt on Morris’s
part towards decorative art (see Rossetti). Early in 1858
Morris published The Defence of Guenevere, which was almost
unnoticed by contemporary criticism, but is now recognized as
one of the pearls of Victorian poetry.
On 26th April 1859 Morris married Jane Burden, a beautiful Oxford girl, who had sat to him as a model, and settled temporarily at 41 Great Ormond Street, London. Meanwhile he set about building for himself at Upton a house which was to be the embodiment of all his principles of decorative art. Furniture, decorations, household utensils and every article of daily use were specially designed, and in the summer of 1860 the house was ready for occupation. The furnishing of it had suggested a fresh activity; Morris now determined to embark upon decoration as a career. A small company was formed, consisting of D. G. Rossetti, Philip Webb, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Faulkner and Marshall, and in January 1862 started business under the title of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., with offices at 8 Red Lion Square. The prospectus set forth that the firm would undertake church decoration, carving, stained glass, metal-work, paper-hangings, chintzes and carpets. The business, after inevitable vicissitudes, flourished, but the “house beautiful” at Upton proved to be unhealthily situated. Serious illness obliged the family to remove to town, and in November 1865 they resettled at 26 Queen Square, Bloomsbury. Morris was now unceasingly busy, but he found time also for literature. In June 1867 he published The Life and Death of Jason, which was at once successful; and in April 1868 the first two parts of The Earthly Paradise. The rest of this wonderful storehouse of poetic romance appeared in two volumes in 1869 and 1870. In the following year he was again looking for a country house, and lighted upon Kelmscott manor house, in the Upper Thames valley, which he took at first in joint-tenancy with Rossetti and used principally as a holiday home. In 1872 appeared Love is Enough, structurally the most elaborate of his poems for its combination of the epic and dramatic spirits; and in the autumn he began to translate the shorter Icelandic sagas, to which his enthusiasm had been directed by two inspiring journeys to Iceland. Business worries, however, interrupted him; it was found necessary to reconstruct the company owing to its having grown out of proportion with the existing division of profit and labour. Long negotiations ensued, and in March 1875 the old firm was dissolved. Morris now became sole manager and proprietor, although the other members of the old firm continued, in varying degrees, to give him the advantage of their assistance and advice.
Meanwhile the epic mood had possessed Morris very strongly, and, in addition to his work upon the sagas, he had actually finished and (in 1875) published a verse translation of the Aeneid, which is interesting rather for its individuality than for any fidelity to the spirit of the original. In the following year appeared Sigurd the Volsung, a version full of heroic vigour, movement and vitality, but somewhat too lengthy and incoherent in design to preserve the epic interest intact to the British taste. This splendid burst of poetic activity, however, had raised him to a place among the first poets of his time; and in 1877 an attempt was made to induce him to accept the professorship of poetry at Oxford. But he felt himself lacking in the academic spirit, and wisely declined. At this time a fresh outlet for his energy was furnished by his foundation in 1877 of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which sprang into being as a practical protest against a scheme for restoring and reviving Tewkesbury Abbey. He began, too, to take an active interest in politics over the Eastern Question, but his enthusiasm was at the moment a flash in the pan. Finding that events were going against his judgment, Morris, as was so often the case with him, shrugged his shoulders and broke free from the movement.
Still, although he found it hard to sit close to a definite party, Morris continued to be spasmodically interested in political movements. During the next few years, indeed, the interest gained ground with him steadily. He became treasurer of the National Liberal League in 1879, but after the Irish coercive measures of 1881 he finally abandoned the Liberal party, and drifted further and further into Socialism. For ten or twelve years this movement had been gaining ground in England, and the Social Democratic Federation was formed in 1881. In January 1883, within a week of his election to an honorary fellowship at Exeter, Morris was enrolled among its members. Thenceforward for two years his advocacy of the cause of Socialism absorbed not only his spare time, but the thought and energy of all his working hours. For it he even neglected literature and art. In March 1883 he gave an address at Manchester on “Art, Wealth and Riches”; in May he was elected upon the executive of the federation. In September he wrote the first of his Chants for Socialists. About the same time he shocked the authorities by pleading in University Hall for the wholesale support of Socialism among the undergraduates at Oxford. Nevertheless, the federation began to weaken. At the franchise meeting in Hyde Park in 1884 it was unable to get a hearing. Morris, however, had not yet lost heart. Internal dissensions in 1884 led to the foundation of the Socialist League, and in February 1885 a new organ, Commonweal, began to print Morris’s splendid rallying-songs. Still, differences of opinion and degree prevented concerted action; and when, after the Trafalgar Square riots in February 1886, Morris remonstrated with the anarchic section he was denounced by the advanced party and ever afterwards was regarded with suspicion. In 1889 he was deposed from the management of Commonweal, and gradually lost all confidence in the movement as an active force.
Long before that time, however, Morris had returned to the paramount interests of his life—to art and literature. When his business was enlarged in 1881 by the establishment of a tapestry industry at Merton, in Surrey, Morris found yet another means for expressing the medievalism that inspired all his work, whether on paper or at the loom. In 1887 he published his translation of the Odyssey, which had many of the qualities and defects of his Aeneid, and is much more interesting as an experiment than valuable as a “Homeric echo.” In the Commonweal appeared News from Nowhere, published in book form in 1891, describing an England in which the principles of communism have been realized. He then added another to his many activities; he assumed a direct interest in typography. In the early seventies he had devoted much attention to the arts of illumination and calligraphy. He himself wrote several manuscripts, with illuminations of his own devising. From this to attempts to beautify the art of modern printing was but a short step. The House of the Wolfings, printed in 1889 at the Chiswick Press, was the first essay in this direction; and in the same year, in The Roots of the Mountains, he carried his theory a step further. Some fifteen months later he added a private printing-press to his multifarious occupations, and started upon the first volume issued from the Kelmscott Press, his own Glittering Plain. For the last few years of his life this new interest remained the
