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THE KELMSCOTT PRESS

AND WILLIAM MORRIS

MASTER-CRAFTSMAN

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA • MADRAS MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

(JJcM>c-ti^ yk-

C^fV>K7

THE KELMSCOTT PRESS AND WILLIAM MORRIS MASTER-CRAFTSMAN. BY H; HALLIDAY SPARLING

FORSOOTH, BROTHERS, FELLOW- SHIP IS HEAVEN, AND LACK OF FELLOWSHIP IS HELL: FELLOW- SHIP IS LIFE, AND LACK OF FELLOW- SHIP IS DEATH : AND THE DEEDS THAT YE DO UPON THE EARTH, IT IS FOR FELLOWSHIP'S SAKE THAT YE DO THEM, AND THE LIFE THAT IS IN IT, THAT SHALL LIVE ON AND ON FOR EVER, AND EACH ONE OF YOU A PART OF IT, WHILE MANY A MAN'S LIFE UPON THE EARTH FROM THE EARTH SHALL WANE.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1924

5r13

COPYRIGHT

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

PREFACE

This book is dedicated to the memory of William Morris, and therefore bears no other inscription. Planned and written as a contribution towards the understanding of his work and of himself, it is based upon some ten years of intimate contact, and of wholehearted participation in many of his activities.

Assistant-editor and then co-editor of the Commonweal-, aiding him in dealing with his correspondence ; his companion upon many journeys; proof-reader, secretary and general handyman of the Kelmscott Press from its foundation until 1894; editing the History es of Troye, Reynard the Foxe, Godefrey of Boloyne, and the unfinished Froissart, under his direction, work upon the Froissart ending only with his death; an ador- ing and eager disciple throughout, I may claim to be especially qualified as an interpreter of his teaching.

My grateful thanks are due to his Trustees collectively and Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell personally for their generous permission to reprint the copyright matter which forms the appendix; to Mr. Robert Steele for invaluable criticisms and suggestions upon matters of fact or opinion; to Messrs. C. T. Jacobi, late of the Chiswick Press, and Frank Cole- brook, late of the Printing Times, for information or advice ; to Mr. Horace Morgan, of Messrs. James Burn & Co., for many kindly services ; to Miss Olive Percival, of Los Angeles, for an unwearied and inspiring discussion of doubts and diffi- culties; to Messrs. Joseph Batchelor & Sons, of Little Chart, H. Band & Co., of Brentford, and W. J. Turney & Co., of Stourbridge, for courteous replies to inquiries.

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&4-IS-S%

It is but fair to add that, although I have untiringly sought help upon all points from those best able to render it, and have quoted freely from the writings of others, the responsibility for any statement of fact or expression of opinion is entirely mine. Regarding the book as my personal homage to William Morris, and a part of my personal service to the cause for which he worked and fought, wherever I have differed irrecon- cilably from a friend or an authority I have taken my own road.

For two reasons, one determined by feeling and the other by convenience, nobody has been "mistered" in the body of this book. To be mentioned in connexion with the Kelmscott Press or with William Morris is, in so far and in my eyes, to be immortalized, and therefore to be spoken of by an unadorned name. Then, to have maintained a conscious watchfulness for an artificial distinction between the dead and the living, or the degrees of social standing, might only too easily have detracted from due attention to points of infinitely greater importance.

By an undesigned coincidence, this preface, which com- pletes the book, has been written on the ninetieth anniversary of William Morris's birth at Walthamstow, March 24th, 1834. Prosit omen!

H. HALLIDAY SPARLING.

VI

CONTENTS

I. THE IDEA TAKES FORM II. PRINTING IN l888 .

III. MORRIS IN l888

IV. APPRENTICESHIP V. PREPARATION

VI. THE MASTER-PRINTER VII. BOOKS PRINTED VIII. ACHIEVEMENT EPILOGUE

13

30 48

5*

72

91 114

132

APPENDIX

A NOTE ON HIS AIMS IN FOUNDING THE KELMSCOTT

PRESS. BY WILLIAM MORRIS . . . 1 35

A SHORT DESCRIPTION OF THE KELMSCOTT PRESS. BY

S. C. COCKERELL ..... I39

AN ANNOTATED LIST OF THE BOOKS PRINTED AT THE

PRESS. BY S. C. COCKERELL . . . I48

VARIOUS LISTS, LEAFLETS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

PRINTED AT THE KELMSCOTT PRESS . . I72

INDEX

175

Vll

LIST OF PLATES

TO FACE

Portrait of William Morris .... Frontispiece r. The " Golden " Type: a page from News from Nozvhere . 8

2. The " Troye " Type. The " Chaucer " Type . . .16

3. From the engraved Titlepage for Syr Tsambrace, 1897: Border by

William Morris. Picture by Sir E. Burne-Jones. Engraved on wood by W. H. Hooper . . . . . .25

4. Frontispiece to A Dream of John Ball by William Morris. Drawn

by E. Burne-Jones. Engraved by W. H. Hooper. Border by Morris . . . . . . . .32

5. Frontispiece to News from Nowhere by William Morris: Kelmscott

Manor, Oxfordshire. Drawn by C. M. Gere. Engraved by W.

H. Hooper. Border by Morris ..... 40

6. Frontispiece to A Tale of the Emperor Coustans Done out of the

Ancient French by William Morris. Drawn by Morris. En- graved by W. H. Hooper ...... 48

7. From William Morris's Drawing for engraved Titlepage for Maud

for the Kelmscott Press, 1893 . . . . -57

8. An Initial Word from the Chaucer ..... 64

9. Chaucer and the Birds. From the first page of Chaucer's Works.

Drawn by Sir E. Burne-Jones. Engraved by W. H. Hooper . 72

10. Colophon for Quarto Books of the Kelmscott Press. . . 80

1 1 . Initial Word for The Water of the Wondrous Isles by William

Morris. One of the last two designs made by Morris shortly before his death . . . . . . .88

The First Colophon ...... 88

12. Italian Humanistic Calligraphy, Fifteenth Century . . . 96

13. Type of Nicholas Jenson: Gloria Mulierum, Venice [1471] . 104 Type of Jacques Le Rouge: Aretino, Lionardo; Historia del Popolo

Fiorentino, Florence, 1476 . . . . .104

14. Type of SchoefFer: Biblia Latina, Mainz, 1472 . . .112 Type of Gunther Zainer, Augsburg, 147 1: Speculum Vitae

Humanae, 1471 . . . . . .112

15. Facsimile of a page of Morris's Manuscript for the proposed

Edition of Froissart . . . . . . .120

16. Facsimile of Morris's Verses for Embroidered Hangings for his

Bed at Kelmscott . . . . . . .128

ix

THE IDEA TAKES FORM

Born into a world that in most respects has been transformed, very largely through the work and influence of William Morris, the reader or student of to-day does not always find it easy to realize the full greatness of the man, or to measure the effect he produced upon the world as he found it. All the less easy because "in the study of this variant mind, always mani- fold and always one, he that runs may not read," and in these days we far too usually read at a run.

It is impossible to compare Morris with any other man of his own time, or of any other time, indeed, in the world's his- tory. It has not been given to many men of any time to be masters of more than one art, and those that have been true masters of one only are none too numerous. But Morris was master of many, practising them all at the same time and to- gether; and those whose knowledge and understanding are confined within the limits of any one art, or any one craft, are not only incapable of comprehending the Master-Craftsman who "set his triumphant hand to everything from the sampler up to the epic," but, in proportion to the narrowing of their in- terests and experience, are puzzled and worried by his output in the one field of activity with which they are acquainted. His poetry is not as that of others, nor his prose, nor his designs, nor anything else that is his, because he recognized and felt the underlying unity of all creative work, and could utilize the skill and experience gained in the pursuit of any one art in the pursuit of any other.

A few years later on, when the men and things of the imme- diate past have taken their due place in historical perspective,

I B

when the passions of yesterday have cooled and the preju- dices of to-day have diminished, Morris will begin to loom up into something like his real size. The tyrannous reign of the specialist — the "nothing-but," as Morris called him — will then, it is to be hoped, be over; and the work that Morris did may be more correctly estimated, each and every one of his achievements being reckoned as part of an organic whole, the work of Rossetti's "one vast Morris." He will no longer be regarded as a poet who strayed into the making of wallpapers, an artist who wasted himself upon the dyeing of silks and the weaving of carpets, or as a genius who lost grip upon reality and wandered offinto a wilderness of Utopian dreams.

He will be recognized for what he was, one of the great men, and not far from the greatest, of his time; some of us think of all time. He has not only bequeathed us an enormous heritage of material and spiritual beauty, but has conditioned our thinking in matters of art to a degree that is comparable only to the conditioning of our thought in matters of science by Darwin. Darwin has been belittled by the little-mindedand abused by the obscurantist, as has Morris, but the immortality of both is assured. Science must reckon with Darwin and art with Morris until the brain of Man is for ever at rest and his heart no longer beats.

Though this book is essentially concerned with but one, and that the latest, of all Morris's activities, in order to under- stand that one we shall have to take note of the others to some extent, accepting the risk of digression and repetition in our search for the truth of things; for Morris the Master-Printer was but a phase of Morris the Master-Craftsman, and the one is unintelligible unless and until the other be understood.

Book-printing as an activity to be studied or pursued did not attract him until 1 8 8 8, in the fifty-fourth year of his life and the thirty-first of his working career. That he had an eye for a comely book, printed or manuscript, from the first, is proven by some of the purchases he made while still a youth ; and when he founded the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in i 856, he entrusted its printing to Charles Whittingham II. at the Chis- wick Press. Now that we have seen what he did himself in the way of book-printing, thirty years later, the get-up of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine looks funny enough, with its

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"typographical" borders to the wrappers, the "dropped head" on the first page of each number, filled with one of the orna- ments designed some years before by Charles Whittingham's daughters, Charlotte and Elizabeth, and engraved by Mary Byfield. In the first and second numbers, but not in the suc- ceeding ones, there is a decorative initial to the first article, due to the same artists. In our eyes of to-day, the whole effect is decidedly quaint, but it was a long way above the level of its time, and, remembering what the mass of current magazines are like, one would hesitate before saying that it was not above the level of ours.

Two years later, after he had left Oxford and was living in Red Lion Square, where he and Edward Burne-Jones in partnership had taken the house previously occupied by Rossetti, he went again to the Chiswick Press for the printing of his Defence of Guenevere. The get-up of this, his first book, suggests that of the magazine, and it is ornamented after much the same fashion. Nine busy years went by before his next book, the Life and Death of Jason, was printed by the Chiswick Press and published on commission by Bell & Daldy, as the magazine and Guenevere had been. There are no ornaments in the Jason.

Up to this time, 1867, Morris had paid for and looked after the printing of his own books, but Jason sold so well that Bell & Daldy offered him a fixed sum for the right to print a second, and afterwards a third, edition on their own account in the ordinary way. In the following year, F. S. Ellis, then in business as bookseller and publisher, took over the publishing of his books, and inaugurated the warm friendship which lasted until Morris's death. Henceforth, up to 1888, Morris took no more interest in the printing of his books than does the average author, and in no case do they rise above a respectable mediocrity.

Had conditions been more favourable, however, he would already have done something towards bringing about the im- provement in book-printing eventually realized by theKelms- cott Press. An edition of the Earthly Paradise, then being written, was planned by him in 1 8 66. This was to have been in double-column folio, full of pictures by Burne-Jones, and very much better got up and printed than any of the books then

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current. More than forty blocks were engraved for this before the project was dropped, some thirty-five of them by Morris himself. Specimen pages were set up at the Chiswick Press; one of them in a Caslon old-face, and the other in the "Basel" type afterwards used for the House of the Wolfings in 1889, and to be described in that connexion. But in 1866 even the component poems of the Earthly Paradise had by no means assumed their definite shape, nor those to be included or laid aside been settled upon. Then, Morris & Co. had been founded in 1861, with a scant capital, mainly provided by Morris; and in 1 865 the downfall of certain inherited invest- ments had very greatly reduced Morris's income, forcing him to part with his famous Red House at Upton in Kent, as well as compelling him to put the greater part of his energies into building up Morris & Co. as a money-earning business.

About 1 87 1 he showed that his interest in book-printing had not altogether died out, by projecting a finely-printed illustrated edition of Love is Enough. Nothing more was done, however, than designing and engraving some of the ornaments. Two initials and seven marginal decorations were designed and engraved by Morris, who also engraved a mar- ginal decoration designed by Burne-Jones. A frontispiece designed by Burne-Jones remained uncut until 1897, when it was engraved by W. H. Hooper, and utilized on the last page of the Kelmscott Press edition of the poem.

Both schemes, that of 1 8 6 6 and that of 1 8 7 1 , would appear to have been conceived and approached from the standpoint of ornament and illustration, with little or no real thought as to the typographical side of the matter. So far as he could recall in after years, it did not occur to Morris to go beyond the types, paper and presswork then available, unsatisfactory as he found these to be for his purpose, or to do otherwise than to drop the work altogether when he discovered that conditions were so strongly against him. Money lacked, if nothing else, for ex- periments made "on his own," and his working-time was fully taken up with Morris & Co. and the wares they produced, which entailed upon him the study and practice of an ever-in- creasing number of crafts. He took refuge in calligraphy and illumination, transcribing and ornamenting favourite poems or poems of his own at odd hours and on Sundays, either as

4

gifts to specially favoured friends or for sheer enjoyment of the work. One of his manuscripts, a Rubaiyat on vellum, is in the British Museum; another, on paper, containing translations from the Icelandic, is in the Fitzwilliam.

To wonder at his not being ready to do in 1 8 7 1 what he did in 1 89 1 is to ignore not only the many undertakings to which he already stood committed, but the immense and many-sided work done by him in the interval, as well as the vital fact that he was a learner to the end of his life, learning from actual working experience even more than from observation and wide reading as he went along. Quite naturally, he did not then possess the more assured knowledge, the wider vision and keener insight, the richer technical experience and masterly skill of eye and hand, that were his in 1 89 1 as the result of un- tiring work in a score of differing fields. It was the time spent by him at the dye-vat and the drawing-board, the loom and the glass-furnace, in the printing-shed for chintzes or wallpapers, in the workshop of the cabinetmaker, at his work-table ascalli- grapher, designer, illuminator, draughtsman, wood-engraver, which prepared and enabled him to become the Master- Printer of 1 89 1— 1896.

That even so late as 1 8 8 6 he felt no personal call towards printing, or, at any rate, took no very great concern in it, is clear from what happened when the printing of the Common- weal was under discussion by the Executive of the Socialist League in that year. Hitherto, the paper had been set up and printed "out," but was henceforth to be set up and made ready in its own office, going "out" only to be machined.

Less than three years later, Morris would certainly have had a good deal to say as to type and get-up and so on ; but as things were, when Thomas Binning — who was to be foreman printer on the Commonweal, and later on to be father of the chapel at the Kelmscott Press — proposed that the paper be set in a "modern" type, Morris allowed the proposal to pass without a murmur as member of the Executive, nor did he complain of the choice in private. Indeed, from first to last, I cannot recall a single instance in which he interested himself in the printing of any pamphlet, leaflet, or anything else issued by the League; and the only ornaments used in League publica- tions were due to Walter Crane. Even the decorative heading

5

of the Commonweal, attributed to Morris by Buxton Forman and others, was not his at all, having been designed and en- graved by George F. Campfield, who presented the block to the League in token of sympathy and support.

Morris's attitude towards another proposal of Binning's in the course of the same discussion — to adopt the "new" or, as it was then called, "Americanized" spelling — was very different ; and the fieriness of his opposition upon this point throws his acquiescence upon the other into striking relief. Because of my supporting Binning, though half-heartedly and through a juvenile desire to be up-to-date, I heard of my "damnable pedantry" in consenting to drop the u from "labour," thereby obscuring the history of the word, which came into Eng- lish from the French, and not directly from the Latin ; of my "unforgivable ignorance" in doing the like for "neighbour," where it was the o that was intrusive; and, finally, of my "in- curable stupidity and blindness" in failing to recognize that the eye picks up a word as a recognizable whole, and that, so long as the word is recognizable as an entity, not confu sable with another, exactitude of spelling is an academic formality.

Not that the superficial ferocity of expression is to be taken too seriously; for Morris's flare-ups were usually as passing and harmless as those of gunpowder lighted in the open ; they were over and done with in an instant, leaving no slightest remnant of irritation or constraint upon his mind or his man- ner. Once, after a similar outburst had ruffled my callow dignity, he explained that "when a fellow damns your eyes, it only means, after all, that he disagrees with you for the mo- ment!" Sometimes, of course, he was really and justifiably angry; but, even then, he was immediately repentant when the storm had passed. After an encounter with a well-known art- critic, during which he had said rather more than he meant, and far more strongly than he cared to remember, he self-accus- ingly commented that "a fellow ought always to be ashamed of losing his temper . . . especially with a hen-headed idiot like that\"

Not only with regard to his "rages," as they have been written of by the uninstructed, has he been a victim of the tendency towards repeating a story with verbal accuracy while conveying an entirely false impression of its meaning. Thus

6

Rossetti's remark that he "never gives a penny to a beggar"has been cited as proof that he was mean, though it was intended to imply the very opposite failing. Again, it is recorded that the talk having turned upon the laureateship, just after Tenny- son's death, Morris insisted upon the then Marquis of Lome as being the fittest man for the appointment; and this has been quotedin proof of hisadmiration forthepoet insteadof his con- tempt for the post. Those who were present can still chuckle over the riotous drollery with which he pictured himself as a flunkey, "sitting down in crimson plush breeches and white silk stockings to write birthday odes in honourof all the bloom- ing little Guelphlings and Battenbergs that happen to come along!"

Returning to the Commonweal, his indifference with regard to its printing, or that of his own books between 1868 and 1888, must not be taken to mean that at any time in his life he was insensible to the charm of a well-written manuscript or a well-printed book. But for fully twenty years he seems to have taken for granted that book-printing as an art was dead, and, except for the evanescent project with regard to Love is Enough in 1 870, to have experienced no personal call to revive it. In this connexion, the quantity and variety of the work that filled and overfilled his days must again be emphasized, as well as the fact that he never went outside of the day's work to look for a new technique to be studied. Stained glass, tiles, wallpapers, figured silks, printed cottons, carpets, embroideries, tapes- tries, furniture, were among but far from all the things he de- signed and wrought at with his own hands, because there was a need for his doing so; and each main craft led him into sub- sidiary or tributary crafts beyond naming, always through some workaday demand or difficulty, in some way to be met or overcome by him alone.

Add his productiveness as poet and prose writer, his ubi- quity as lecturer for the causes that came near his heart, allow for an occasional rare day of comparative relaxation ; and the wonder then is, not that printing came so late as 1888 within the scope of his activities, but that it ever came there at all.

That it ever did come there was almost entirely due to Emery Walker, an eager and lifelong student of typography, and one of Morris's most intimate friends from 1884 until the

7

end. That it should come when it did was determined by the holding of the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition. A few good examples of the best class of commercial printing were there shown ; but, out of the long list of Morris's own works, not one was felt by him to be worthy of inclusion. Printing stood con- spicuously alone among the arts and crafts which are concerned with daily life in a domestic interior as being unrepresented by any example of things "you know to be useful and believe to be beautiful," either produced by himself or under his direct in- fluence. This was for him not only regrettable in itself, but in connexion with his own books a reproach.

Among the illustrated lectures delivered at the Exhibition Was one on "Printing" by Emery Walker, which he talked over with Morris while preparing the slides for it. This en- tailed a careful examination of incunabula, of manuscripts that had been or might have been taken for models by the earlier printers, as well as later examples of what ought or ought not to have been done, and lengthy discussion of all the factors which tell for beauty or the reverse in a printed book.

November 15, 1888, then, the date of this lecture, may be taken as the first certain date in the history of the Kelmscott Press, as it was that on which Morris resolved upon designing and possessing a fount of his own. It is true that he had already, and more than once, during his talks with Walker, expressed a desire to "have a shot" at this, an intention "one of these days" to "see what can be done." But the desire now hardened into a definite purpose, and the intention into a determination to begin at once.

His one remaining doubt was upon the point of cost ; as to whether he could afford the expense of making the experiment. At the time and until November 1 8 90, he was finding several hundreds of pounds a year for the maintenance of the Common- weal, and had as yet no idea of selling any copies of the book or books to be printed, nor did that idea occur to him at all until it was forced upon him from the outside, as will be told in its place. The new project presented itself and appealed to him as an endeavour, to be made by him and at his own charge, to re- attain a long-lost standard of craftsmanship in book-printing. Nor had he got so far as to think of having anything nearer to a press of his own than a composing-room, in which the type

The Love friend, this is what I came out for to see : this many • of the Earth gabled old house built by the simple country-folk ofthelong'pasttimes,regardlessofalltheturmoil that was goingon in cities andcourts,is lovelystill amidst all the Leauty which these latter days have created; & I do not wonder at our friends tending it carefully and makingmuch of it. It seems tome as if it had waited for these happy days, and held in it the gathered crumbs of happiness of the con^ fused and turbulent past/' C S>he led me up close to the house, and laid her shapely sun^browned hand and arm onthelichened wallas if to embrace it, and cried out: " O me ! O me ! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things that deal with it, & all that grows out of it, as this has done 1" CI could not answer her, or say a word. Her exultation and pleasure were so keen and ex' quisite, & her beauty, so delicate, yet so interfused with energy, expressed it so fully, that any added word would have been commonplace and futile. I dreaded lest the others should come in suddenly and break the spell she had cast about me; but we stood there a while by the corner of the big gable of the house, and no one came. I heard the merry voices some way off presently, & knew that they were goingalong the river to the greatmeadowon the other side of the house and garden. C We drew back a little, & looked up at the house : the door and the windows were open to the fragrant sun-cured air; from the upper window-sills hung festoons of 292

the "golden" type: a page from "news from nowhere"

might be set up and imposed, the formes then going to Emery Walker's offices, at No. 1 6 Clifford's Inn, to be printed from. His one doubt was at an end when Walker had made or ob- tained a detailed estimate, and he found that he might hope to produce and enjoy a "decent-seeming" book, having enough copies for distribution among a few chosen friends, at the ap- proximate cost of one copy of "a book worth looking at" — i.e. one of the finer incunabula — though the prices then fetched by such things were far from those to which they now run.

With Emery Walker's ungrudging aid, he immediately entered upon an intensive study of old models, and also of the technique of book-printing. For a deeper and readier grasp of the latter than can be reached by most men in a lifetime, he had been prepared by his long working experience in the printing of wallpapers and fabrics, while his friend and mentor was the best helper he could possibly have found in the world. Then, the penman's eye was his, as well as that of the designer and skilled craftsman. It need hardly be said that he went to the very root of the matter, giving as much assiduity and care to examining and considering the finest manuscripts and their handwriting as he gave to the incunabula and their types.

He had often bought such things in the past, but was not in the least a "collector," and had parted with most of them in order to find money for the Commonweal and for the Socialist movement as a whole, retaining no more than a favoured few, valued for their intrinsic interest as much as for their pleasant- ness to the eye. But he now began to buy both manuscripts and printed books for their beauty and technical perfection, their worth to him as good exemplars of those merits at which he intended to aim in his own work. During the remainder of his life, he formed in this way a splendid collection which un- happily was more or less dispersed after his death; not en- tirely so, for a great part of it passed into the Pierpont Morgan Library, now one of the public treasures of the City of New York.

No matter how enthusiastic or deeply stirred he might be, he was not the man to rush things when work was in question, or to enter upon an untried field without the most conscien- tious research and preparation. A full year of inquiry and experiment was to be spent before he addressed himself to the

9

task of type-designing, to that of papermaking, and so on, de- liberately and with due trust in his command of material and method. Work was too sacred in his eyes to be undertaken until it could be well done, done steadily, with hand and tools under full control and the end clearly in view.

For hasty work, or work done erratically on the plea that it was "inspirational," he had nothing but distrust and con- tempt. "Waiting for inspiration, rushing things in reliance upon inspiration, and all the rest of it, are a lazy man's habits. Get the bones of the work well into your head, and the tools well into your hand, and get on with your job, and the inspira- tion will come to you — if you're worth a tinker's damn as an artist, that is!" His definition of an artist being: "A chap who can keep his eye in the boat, and let his hand think for him." At another time he said : " It is only an apprentice or a botcher who has to think of the how, or worry about what one calls tech- nique. The master of any trade can keep his eye on the work, what he wants to do, and leave his hand to get it out. He has it in his mind's eye clearly enough, but when it is finished, his hand has put a lot of things into it that his mind never thought of. That is exactly where inspiration comes in, if you want to call it so.

Unless I, in my turn, am to tell a true story in such a way as to suggest a lie, some comment is needed here. Morris's own work was wholly "inspirational" in the higher and better sense of the term. That is to say, none of it was ever done under compulsion or without the driving force of a creative impulse behind it; but, on the other hand, none of it was "inspira- tional" in the sense of being done by fits and starts with fallow intervals in between. Driving so many horses abreast as he did, he had never to wait in idleness for the spirit to move him toward creation in one medium or another. Should the verse- impulse be dormant for the moment, the prose-impulse or the design-impulse, or some other, was in control of his brain and hand. To put it more accurately, it might be said that one titanic driving-impulse to create beauty was unintermittently active, finding release through any one of many media that offered itself at any given instant, and the medium of the actual moment was not always — was rarely — consciously chosen. Thus it seemed to him as though his creations "growed," and

10

if he ever took pride in them at all, it was rather in the head- and-hand work which gave them form than in the deeper and almost unfelt effort which gave them substance. It was not in him, therefore, to appreciate and allow for the position of a "nothing-but" — the poet who is poet only, or the painter who is helpless at aught but painting — who must perforce either wait in idle sterility for the one impulse to return, or toilingly turn out work that were better left undone, or done for practice and then destroyed.

By way of marking the time and pains that Morris gave to a project, once he had formulated it and put his hand to the plough, take the following dates :

November 1888. Emery Walker's lecture.

December 1889. Type-designing begun.

December 1890. Last punches of "Golden" type cut.

January 1891. Trial-page pulled of Glittering Plain. Allowance has to be made, of course, for the fact that he gave neither the whole of any day nor any fixed part of all his days to the new undertaking, which was rather the relaxation of leisure hours than the business to which he must see. Not one of his usual occupations was put aside, nor did his fertility in other directions perceptibly slacken. "Relaxation" and "leisure," however, are distinctly relative terms when used in connexion with him ; for he found rest in change of work, and held that he was idling while doing that which would have exhausted any other man I have ever known.

To his methods of work I shall have to return, but this much may be said here: that "the man in the backshop," to use his own phrase, or "the subconscious mind" in the cant of to-day, was for ever engaged upon the next job, that visibly in hand having been thought over and matured while another or others were exteriorizing themselves in tangible shape. "I have an artichoke mind," he said once; "no sooner do I pull off a leaf than there's another waiting to be pulled." Wendell Holmes has touched somewhere upon the parallel currents of conscious- ness, and what they carry at a particular time. In Morris's case, every one of these currents was a creative stream, each of them busy about its own concerns and untroubled by the others. Each came to the surface at its own due time, and had but to be relieved of its rich burden ; this being no sooner drawn, written,

1 1

or otherwise brought into concrete existence, than it was done with and forgotten.

"I'm a tidyminded man," he urged in his own defence when Poems by the Way was going through the press, and he could render little or no help towards getting its contents together. "Tidymindedness," as he called it, went the length of throw- ing off all thought of work that had once been finished, and we had to rely upon others for the retrieving of his fugitive poems — even for identifying more than one. It is more than prob- able that this "tidymindedness" had a good deal to do with the indifference he for so long displayed to the printing of his works; so soon as the manuscripts had been completed and handed over, his interest in them waned, if it did not vanish. In fact, work once done was done with to such an extent that it must stand or fall on its merits. When the Earthly Paradise was being re-set for the double-columned single-volume edi- tion, he saw to the correction of misprints and amended one or two faulty rhymes, but further than this he would not go.

"A man's hand will tell you more about him, and more truly, than his tongue or that of anybody else can. Unless you know his work, you won't learn much by listening to him — and less yet by reading about him." In order to do my best, however, toward the understanding of Morris and his achievement,even on the part of those who are as yet unfamiliar with his work — with a hope, also, of sending these to search for and study it — I shall roughly survey the history and condition of book-print- ing as it was before he took it up, sketch his record and methods of work as artist and craftsman up to that point, deal with the course of training through which he put himself, his prepara- tions to commence printer, tell about the Kelmscott Press and the books it produced, and then try to estimate its enduring influence upon the art of printing.

12

II

PRINTING IN 1888

It is all the more necessary to outline the history of book-print- ing as Morris knew it, and to approximate the state in which he found it, because of the harm, no less than the good, that has been wrought in the interval. What has been and is being achieved for the improvement of printing, conscientiously and with conscious effort — self-conscious only too often — is con- tinuously imperilled by its very conscientiousness, which tells nowadays toward science rather than art, as well as by the con- tinual growth and increased acceptance of mechanism, and the inevitable toleration of ugliness which comes of that, even to those who are alert for beauty. Alike as readers, printers and letter-designers, we suffer from the typewriter, mechanical compositor and their concomitants — to say nothing of the un- loveliness of our usual surroundings — which set up in us a sub- conscious barrier against the beauty we consciously seek.

Morris condemned the typewriter for creative work ; it was "all right for journalism and the like; there's nothing to be said for that! For hastily written copy, which doesn't matter anyway, it may be desirable, or for a chap who can't write clearly — I daresay the Commonweal compositors would be glad enough were Blank to go in for one ! — but it's out of place in imaginative work or work that's meant to be permanent. Any- thing that gets between a man's hand and his work, you see, is more or less bad for him. There's a pleasant feel in the paper under one's hand and the pen between one's fingers that has its own part in the work done. ... I always write with a quill be- cause it's fuller in the hand for its weight, and carries ink better

— good ink — than a steel pen I don't like the typewriter or

13

the pneumatic brush — that thing for blowing ink on to the paper — because they come between the hand and its work, as I've said, and again because they make things too easy. The minute you make the executive part of the work too easy, the less thought there is in the result. And you can't have art with- out resistance in the material. No! The very slowness with which the pen or the brush moves over the paper, or the graver goes through the wood, has its value. And it seems to me, too, that with a machine one's mind would be apt to be taken offthe work at whiles by the machine sticking or what not."

Never having used a typewriter himself, and not knowing anyone who habitually did so then, he could not foresee a further evil which comes of it. A man, trained in his youth to the pen, but for whom the machine is now so familiar that he seems to think into it without pause or hesitation, has in great part lost that sense of restraint which made for measure and rhythm in what he writes, but may in fancy, perhaps, recapture the sensuous pleasure in the act of writing which once was his. Imagination may give him the feel of the pen in his fingers, the glide of his hand upon the paper,and the growth of wordsunder his eye, while his periods turned themselves upon the recur- rent but ever-varying curves and lines of the letters he shaped. But what, even in fancy, he cannot recapture is the unhesitat- ing certainty with which he could once judge type, telling the merits or failings of a letter or discriminating between allied faces, detect a strayed or faulty letter without effort or strained care, or pull up at a "hound's tooth" which is wellnigh invisible to him now. He has paid for his gain of speed and accept- ability to editors with a narcotization of his eye, a diminished power of swift discrimination, an inurement to the distortion of letters in order that m and 1 may go upon the same-sized body and strike into the same space, to a rigidity of spacing which disfigures a page with "rivers," and all the other con- cessions to mechanical uniformity. Only by days passed in the transcription by hand of good models, endeavouring as he goes along to comprehend the hows and whys of their unadorned comeliness, can he hope in any measure to regain his old skill.

A printer suffers in a similar way and to an even greater degree. Continual setting from typewritten copy, even though he set by hand, has its natural effect, and his estate is worsened

14

if he set by linotype, having no control over spacing. Add that the type he sets has too often been compressed for the sake of money-saving or is mannered for the sake of "difference"; that punctuation has been over-simplified for the minimizing of "sorts" ; that the only models he has ever seen, apart from the current printing of to-day, are, on the average, those that have been thrust under his uninterested nose at a craft-school or museum, or been reduced or smoothed into unrecognizability in his trade-paper ; and one can but pity his lot.

Then,the craze for "time-saving" — in order,it would really appear, to have time to kill — has had its inevitable effect; its universal effect, for all crafts and all products have suffered alike. Brickmaking, for example, has deteriorated no less than the making of books. Old-time bricks and tiles were made of heavy clay, long exposed and well tempered, beaten by hand into the moulds and thus made hard and homogeneous throughout. Nowadays, the lightest obtainable clay is used without weathering or tempering, hastily squeezed into shape by machine, and burned without "waste of time." Though the "improved" bricks and tiles may be more accurately shaped and have an external appearance of better finish, there are hidden inequalities of density, setting up strains and stresses which make for weakness and lack of durability, wholly un- known before "science" took a hand in their manufacture and more than doubled their ultimate cost in seeking immediate profit. The same story might be told of wood, rubber, silk, and half a hundred other products, robbed of strength and durability by commercialized "science."

Nor is the average reader likely — less likely still to be quali- fied— to call the printer to account. Apart from the typed letters to which he is accustomed in business, his taste has been vitiated by the daily reading of books, newspapers and maga- zines,printed in a variety of disagreeing types,in which the lines have been spaced at a stroke, so that the spaces between words are mechanically equal and therefore differ widely to the eye, while the column or page is bestreaked by rivers, greyed by skinniness of type and poorness of ink, every defect being em- phasized by the glare due to wide leading and glazed paper.

Thus, at least as much as in Morris's day, the critical taste of the average printer is being deadened, where not killed, and

15

that of the reader falsified where not altogether destroyed, by an unconsciously cultivated insensitiveness to the little things that in sum are beauty; their absence entailing its opposite, no matter how perfected and up-to-date the machinery and the mechanical skill involved may be. And it must be taken for a moot point as to whether and how far a designer of type, how- ever well-intentioned, learned and finely inspired, can alto- gether escape the fate that has befallen printer and reader, keeping his eye clear and his taste undefiled in a time that, at its best, is one of transition and revolt — not always intelligent — oscillating between dilettantism on the one hand and philis- tinism on the other.

In printing, we are mercifully preserved from cubism and the like by the nature of things, though the art nouveau had its Grasset; but, on the other hand, by the nature of things, the designer of type is denied a resource which is open to the painter or sculptor; who, if he will, may return to nature at any time, finding innumerable models — provided fresh and fresh, as it were — from which to take example, and by means of which to restore the truth and strength of his eye. It is true that the type-designer may also go to nature in order to refresh hisjaded sense of colour and form, whet the dulled edge of his discern- ment, and renew his inborn sense of taste. But nature offers him no model.

There is no absolute standard of perfection in type-design to which he may refer, no ready-made method or code of rules by which he may determine the "fashion" of his letter. For this he is thrown back upon his own eye, with what help he may get from studying the successes and failures of his predeces- sors. Their success or their failure he can only judge by the legibility and beauty of the books they have left him, and by those qualities in those books alone, and by neither the show of type on a specimen-sheet nor its misleading look in a reproduction.

From the Renaissance onwards, many attempts have been made to set up a standard and codify a set of rules through scientific research and mathematical methods, but Morris very strongly held that all such attempts were foredoomedto failure ; though those of the Italian writing-masters, who tried to ascer- tain and reduce to precept the practice of their exemplars, "had something to say for themselves."

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I any the more: though it would in- deed be hard if there were nothing else in the world, no wonders, no ter- rors, no unspeakable beauties* Yc* when we think what a small part of the world's history, past, present, & to come, is this land we live in, and howmuch smaller still in the history of the arts, & yet how our forefathers clung to it, and with what care and

THE "TROYE TYPE

not see bow these can be betterepent than in making life cheerful & honourable for others and for ourselves ; and the gain of good life to thecoun try atlarge that would result from men seriously setting about the bettering of the decency of our big towns would be priceless, even if nothing specially good be- fell the arts in consequence: 1 do not know that it would; but 1 should begin to think matters hopeful if men turned their atten- tion to such things, andlrepeat that, unless they do so, we can scarcely even begin with any hopeour endeavours for the betteringof tbeHrts. (from the lecture called TTbe Lesser Hrts, in Ropes and fears for Hrt, by Glilliam Morris, pages 22 and 33*)

THE "CHAUCER TYPE

While Morris was at work upon printing, Talbot Baines Reed formulated a tentative statement, based upon the re- searches and experiments of Dr. Javal and other continental scientists, which met with his approval, as well as that of another friend of his, the well-known oculist, William Lang: i. That the eye, after all, is the sovereign judge of form. 2. That, in reading, the eye travels horizontally along a perfectly straight line, lying slightly below the top of the ordinary letters. So that the width of a letter is of more consequence than its height, and the upper half of it than the lower. 3. That, in reading, the eye does not take in letters, but words or groups of words. 4. That the type which by its regularity of alignment, its due balance between black and white, its absence of dazzling contrasts between thick and thin, by its simplicity and un- obtrusiveness, lends itself most readily to this rapid and com- prehensive action of the eye, is the most legible. 5. That such type is, on the whole, the most beautiful.

In accepting this as a summary outline of the matter, with strong reservations as to Nos. 4 and 5, Morris laid particular stress upon the first article — that the eye, after all, is the sove- reign judge of form — and as a corollary insisted upon the need of pursuing the inquiry into periods before the invention of printing.

Inasmuch as the hand of the penman is free to follow the dictates of his eye, and is freest when unhampered by theory or dominated by the demand of a machine-ridden market, it stands to reason that there was more likelihood of making letters legible and beautiful when books were hand-written than at any later time. When hand and eye are in consonance, the hand responds — automatically, it might almost be said — to a desire for pleasure on the part of the eye. The odds are therefore in favour of the pre-mechanistic manuscript as op- posed to the printed book, even at its best, when choosing an object of study with a view to disengaging the factors of legi- bility and beauty.

It need hardly be said that "legibility" and "beauty," for Morris, meant something other than easy readability for the mass of readers, whose literary appetite is met by the report of a murder or a written-to-sell short-story, or the gingerbread sham-beauty which entices those whose artistic demands are

17 c

satisfied by the movies or a "kiss-me" lithograph. Nor did the meaning he gave the words coincide with that which is given them by the slightly more cultivated who yet are victims of the toleration of ugliness, now so common in our machine-made world.

These qualities, as he thought of them, he found in the work of the earlier printers, and yet more completely in that of the scribes, their predecessors and exemplars ; seeing them, as he did, with eyes that had been disciplined by long years of scrutinizing and rendering all kinds of natural form in many kinds of material. If he had been accused of surrendering to convention in so thinking and acting, he would very cheerfully have pleaded guilty to the charge, and would then have carried the war into the enemy's country by demonstrating that human work in any field is and must be entirely governed from first to last by "convention" — that is, by convenience in the higher and wider sense of the word. That in the particular field with which we are here concerned, the making and reading of books, the written or printed word is no more than a conventional symbol, which by general agreement or convention is intended to sug- gest rather than convey a sound ; which sound in its turn is no more than a conventional symbol, intended to evoke an idea that it cannot represent. That, in short, as printers, not to say as human beings, we are very strictly confined to a world of convention. That the opposite of convention is anarchy and a welter of whimsies, and that the real question lies between a convention that has been found convenient during a long period of working convenience, and one that has been or may be set up to accord with or excuse the evanescent needs or de- sires of a passing epoch. And he would have quoted, as I have heard him quote, Cesar Daily's retort upon Viollet-le-Duc: "M. Viollet-le-Duc is a very great man; but, for my part, I prefer to appeal to history."

When books were multiplied by hand, each successive copy of a fine manuscript was, or tended to be, an experiment in the direction of greater legibility and beauty — inevitably so, for the reasons that have already been given. The conventions ar- rived at were transmitted by precept and example, i.e. by tradi- tion and custom \ tradition, which reached back into the night of time, was continuously being enriched, while custom was

18

continuously being modified, as the outcome of practical work- ing experience, down to the Renaissance. This applies to all the arts and crafts without exception. There were of course many manuscripts, of lesson-books or other books of utility, that were turned out as rapidly as possible, without thought of beauty or touch of decoration ; but even for these, tradition held, and at their very worst they are immeasurably above the eye-degrading school-books and utility-books of our own time. For the better class of work there was always a demand, there- fore a supply, and there are hundreds of manuscripts in exist- ence that go near to perfection ; few libraries of note are now without examples to which reference may profitably be made by a student. The unornamented and less-valued manuscripts have perished and are perishing day by day. Morris once gave me some leaves out of one of these latter, rescued from a maker of children's tambourines — together with some forcible advice as to my handwriting — which leave nothing to be de- sired in the direction of unadorned grace.

Printing — "that most noble of the Mechanick Arts, being that which to Letters and Science hath given the Precision and Durability of the printed Page" — was invented in re- sponse to a growing demand for speed; as was the steam- engine two hundred years later. It came at an opportune mo- ment for the world in general, but at a fatal one for its own continued integrity as an art. Indeed, as an art, printing de- clined in an inverse ratio to its rise as an industry; largely be- cause of the loss of tradition and the debasement of the general level of taste in "that period of blight which was introduced by the so-called Renaissance," when men entered upon "a singu- larly stupid and brutal phase of that rhetorical and academic art which, in all matters of ornament, has held Europe captive ever since. ... A time of so much and such varied hope that people call it the time of the New Birth; as far as the arts are concerned, I deny it that title; rather it seems to me that the great men who lived and glorified the practice of art in those days were the fruit of the old, not the seed of the new order of things."

The press being already in existence, the invention was a double one : that of movable metal types, and that of printer's ink; this latter an adaptation of oil-paint, itself but recently

19

invented. And behind the invention lay the idea of repro- ducing manuscripts, with greater facility and speed than could be made possible with the pen, but with the utmost achievable fidelity of adaptation. It may be only a legend that the first printed books were offered and bought for manu- scripts, and, in any case, the deception could not long have been maintained; but the first intention undoubtedly was to adapt the work of the pen. It may be noted, in passing, that as a consequence the first great printed book remained the best printed book until the Kelmscott Chaucer came to rival it.

Naturally, the first printers took the best manuscripts with- in reach as their models, not only in general but in particular, not only as wholes but in detail. That is to say, not only were their founts designed to resemble the handwriting of chosen manuscripts, but each letter in a fount was closely copied from the most attractive out of many variants. If there were, as there were, a dozen or a score or more m's or d's or y's on a page, each varying slightly from all the others, as they must, the type-designer took that which satisfied his penman's eye the more fully for model; feeling free, at the same time, to adapt it as might be needed to his new methods. And in taking over the manner and semblance of a manuscript, he took over the tradition that went along with it.

For the Roman letter, all out the more important in our western world, Nicholas Jenson the Frenchman, working at Venice, though not absolutely the first was the greatest of the pioneers. He selected the best letters from the best work of his contemporaries among the Italian scribes — who had them- selves not so long before returned upon the noble simplicity of an earlier day — and brought them triumphantly into line with the requirements of typography. His characters are those of a highly trained penman and man of taste, well rounded within a square, at once dignified and clear. There is the individuality of an artist in them, without in any way detracting from their fidelity to tradition or their unaffected severity. Their align- ment is even, but not baldly neat ; descenders and ascenders are gracefully in proportion to the ordinary letters ; and the counter or inside white is as open as it may well be without conveying a suggestion of weakness. All serifs are right-angled, which

20

gives them durability, and adds a spirited finishing touch to the letter.

Aldus followed Jenson, and improved upon his roman in some ways, though the Aldine Greek type is poor, being taken from the debased Greek handwritingof his time ; but the manu- script influence was on the wane, and the medieval tradition, "unbroken since the very first beginnings of art upon this planet," was perceptibly dying. Good as the Aldine roman might be, its designer's hand had not been subdued to the pen, and it betrays the first frosty touch of academicism upon his mind. Looking back, we see that this was only what might have been expected; for, while the "study of Greek literature at first hand " aided the intellectual development of cultivated men, yet "since they did but half understand its spirit, [it] was warping their minds into fresh error." They "thought they saw a perfection of art which to their minds was different in kind . . . from the ruder suggestive art of their fathers ; this perfection they were anxious to imitate, this alone seemed to be art to them ; the rest was childishness." But "when the great masters of the Renaissance were gone, they who, stung by the desire of doing something new, turned their mighty hands to the work of destroying the last remains of living popular art, putting in its place for a while the results of their own wonder- ful individuality — when these great men were dead, and lesser men . . . were masquerading in their garments, then at last it was seen what the so-called New Birth really was; then we could see that it was the fever of the strong man yearning to accomplish something before his death, not the simple hope of the child, who has long years of life and growth before him."

Hastened by the segregation of the "fine" from the "do- mestic" arts, those that are also crafts, their divorce from archi- tecture, and the growing division between men of thought and men of action, between head-men and hand-men — which has now been carried so far that plans and designs are made by men who could not possibly carry them out, and carried out by men who cannot in the least understand or appreciate them — the arts "in these latter days of the Renaissance . . . took the down- ward road with terrible swiftness, and tumbled down at the bottom of the hill, where, as if bewitched, they lay long in great content."

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GeorTroy Tory, professor of philosophy turned printer's reader — which meant no loss of prestige or status in those days as it does in these, when the "knowing noodles," as Morris termed them, keep apart from useful men — and theorist above all things, tried to reduce lettering to an exact science, and the designing of type to a mathematical system. He was one of those who thought they saw a perfection of art that was differ- ent in kind from the ruder art of their fathers, and was stung by the desire of doing something new. Far-fetched and ill- founded as were his conclusions, they inspired a greater man than he, his pupil, Claude Garamond, when producing that which was to rank above all others as the model type of modern Europe.

To deny Garamond's merit would be ridiculous, or to be- little the graceful, if academic, proportioning of his letter; of this, the thins are in definite and pleasing relation to the thicks, while its triangled serifs are as well calculated as Jenson's to finish off a character with spirit, and to retain their sharp strength under usage. A great advance in punchcutting is marked by the keen arrises of its face, and the justification of the fount as a whole goes far to show that letterfounding, no less than punchcutting, was coming near to technical perfec- tion. When so much has been said, however, one is compelled to set against Garamond's name that, in connexion with print- ing, he was the last and most fatal of the "strong men yearn- ing," rather the "fruit of the old" than the "seed of the new"; that his was the proudest and the final repudiation of that immemorial heritage of tradition that the earlier printers had taken over from "the fathers and famous men that begat them. ' '

It is characteristic of the Renaissance that Garamond, like his master, was attracted as by an irresistible tropism to the academic leaden age of Rome rather than to the virile period of growth which had preceded it. Lettering was the one indi- genous art of Rome, the single one undominated by Greek precedent, and was akin therefore to the crafts which were more particularly Roman in maintaining its fertility and free- dom for some time after all else had been reduced to rule and regulated from above. The first year of our epoch may roughly be taken as marking its point of culmination ; thenceforward — though, as has been said, it held out longer than most, especi-

22

ally in outlying parts of the Empire — it shared with all the other arts in the steadily deadening effect of the replacement of the free craftsman by slave labour. The earliest examples we have are inscriptions on stone, stiffly archaic; but pen- writing seems to have come in about 300 B.C., most probably from the East, and exerted a marked influence, even upon monumental inscriptions.

"In pen-written characters," as W. R. Lethaby says in Londinium, "the thick and thin strokes make themselves with- out there being any design in the matter. It seems equally natural in large clear writing to finish off the strokes with a thin touch of the pen to sharpen the forms. This procedure was taken over so exactly into inscriptions cut on stone that, for the most part, it seems these must first have been written on the stone with an implement like a wide brush and cut in afterwards by a mason. The chisel, like the pen, is thin and wide, and thus perfectly fitted to develop the habit of the pen. . . . Whoever wishes to design inscriptions must begin on the writing basis . . . take up the practice of writing capital and small letters with single strokes of the pen, not 'touching up' or 'painting' the letters, and, above all, not 'designing' them with high-waisted bars, swollen loops, little-headed S curves, and other horrors of ignorance and vulgarity, but learning once

for all a central standard style It is difficult to draw out any

general rules of form and spacing; generally O and C were very round in form, N of square proportions, and M wider than a square. The round letters were usually thickened, not where the curves would touch vertical tangents, but a little under and over, just as is natural in writing the letters. The loops of D and R do not become horizontal at top and bottom, but bend freely. A, N and M usually have square terminations at the upper angles." Examples of rapid cursive writing on bricks and tiles, written while the clay was yet soft and unburnt, give the origin of our lower-case letters.

Later on, as free labour was gradually killed out by slave- labour, for which "designs" must be provided that could be blindly followed and mechanically executed, all those virile qualities which derived from the free pen or chisel in the hand of a free craftsman gave way before an encroaching tide of academic formalism. The "strong men" of the Renaissance,

23

who were the unwitting pioneers of a slave-epoch in all but the individualistic arts, inevitably turned to the slave-time prece- dents, and bent their energies to the academizing of these to a higher degree — or a lower. And again, quite naturally, the designer of to-day, a day of dehumanized machine industry, served by men who are nominally freemen in all but their work, too frequently follows the Renaissance masters in their follow- ing rule-ridden precedents instead of going behind them to the age of gold. It is not merely that his mind, steeped in the slave-atmosphere, is attuned to the leaden age, but that he finds it easier to shape himself upon the academic imitators of leaden Rome than upon the originals these last imitated, and fell short of. If a man has an innate preference for the Classic, surely there is no reason why he should not seek inspiration in the firm yet free lettering of the best period, and do fine work as a result! But, even then, he would be well advised to give at least an equal attention to the later Middle Age, when the book had been fully evolved, and lettering subdued to the needs of the book instead of those merely of the monument.

It has been said of Garamond that he emancipated the art of printing from the shackles of a dead past, though it is by no means easy to find the mark of those shackles, or any others, upon the extraordinarily varied and living work of those who went before him. Nor can it be claimed that any of his own successors improved upon or equalled him, as they must in- evitably have done had he actually freed their feet from any impediment, or pointed the way to higher things. With Gara- mond, as a matter of historic fact, easily verified by any one who has eyes to see, ended the last faint lingering influence upon printing of that orally transmitted craft-knowledge, that rich heritage of tradition which had been accumulating "since the veryfirst beginningsof art upon this planet." Andif shackles come into the matter at all, he rather aided the imposition of new than struck away any old ones.

Garamond, indeed, stands upon the verge of that Valley of the Shadow of Death into which all the arts were to descend, and his own type was very soon tinkered with to bring it into accord with a lowering taste, on the way down to the corrup- tion of that "epoch of piggery and periwiggery," the "vile Pompadour period." "The fine arts, which had in the end of

24

FROM THE ENGRAVED TITLE PAGE FOR SYR YSAMBRACE I 897 Border by William Morris. Picture by Sir E. Burne-Jones. Engraved on wood by W. H. Hooper

the 1 6th century descended from the expression of the people's faith and aspirations into that of the fancy, ingenuity and whim of gifted individuals, fell lower still, dragging the do- mestic or applied arts in their train. They lost every atom of beauty and dignity, and retained little even of the ingenuity of the earlier Renaissance," while tradition had still a fading life in it, becoming "mere expensive and pretentious though care- fully finished upholstery, mere adjuncts of pomp and state, the expression of the insolence of riches and the complacency of respectability."

In the earlier printed books, as in the manuscripts upon which they followed, a reciprocal harmony between the thicks and thins of the lettering and those of the black-and-white illustrations or decorations — which may, as in Roman days, have been undesignedly arrived at through the use of the pen when drawing for both — had been maintained as a tradition, if not for its own sake. Under the new dispensation, this har- mony disappeared, and the utmost fertility of invention and mechanical skill was devoted to bringing disparate processes to bear upon book-production, till an expensive book became rather a forced assemblage of quarrelsome elements than an organic whole, was "bedizened rather than ornamented," while the type itself lost its own inner agreement, and in the end, by Bodoni and Didot, its thins were thinned until they were skin- nily mean, and its thicks thickened until they were potbellied.

If this were the fate of printing as an art, as the "expression of the insolence of riches," its degradation as a trade went naturally and inevitably further; for "the complacency of re- spectability" was but a poor safeguard against the growth of commercialism. A stand was made for a time, here and there, as by the Elzevirs, who followed Garamond as their exemplar but lowered the standard he had set, and notably by William Caslon, who commenced founder in 1720 — the year, by the way,in which Samuel Richardson commenced printer — taking his letter from among the best of the Elzevirs, but giving it a little more solidity than they did, a hint of the manner of about a hundred years before.

Caslon's type has more than a tinge of "the complacency of respectability," but is thoroughly British in being a common- sense compromise between the academic weakness and the

2S

clumsy vulgarity which characterized the reigning types of his time. It is regular, bold and clear ; its thins are of a commend- able thickness, while its thicks have none of the coarseness pre- valent among its Dutch competitors. It is well and truly justi- fied, each letter being designed and cut as one of an alphabet, every member of which must range and harmonize with all the others. Even when there is a perceptible weakness in one letter — e.g. the lower-case s, always the most difficult letter in a Roman fount — when examined in isolation, that weakness can hardly be detected when the letter appears in combination with others on a page. This attribute of good ranging is woefully to seek in many of the founts due to his immediate predecessors, contemporaries and successors, and is only too often lacking in those of these days, even in some of the most able and con- scientious efforts of good men.

Caslon did not only look after the relation of letter to letter in a fount, but was careful to preserve an harmonious relation throughout the whole series of which that fount was a part, so that a printer might be able to use two or more sizes of his type upon a job, and be sure of the same fashion and quality from one end of it to the other. This is not quite so easily managed as might be thought, and its achievement marks out Caslon as something of an artist. A working series of Roman founts that will cheerfully go together is not to be got by designing a letter, of whatever merit, and reducing or enlarging it with mathe- matical exactitude or by mechanical means. When reducing from a larger size to a smaller, for example, though the width of the letter should be in strict proportion, the length of the descenders and height of the ascenders must be relatively in- creased, while the thickness of the thicks, compared with that of the thins and the serifs, must also be greater. But there is no rule in the matter beyond the rule of thumb : "the eye, after all, is the sovereign judge of form."

As Garamond stands upon the brink of the pit into which printing descended, in company with all the arts, so do Bodoni and Didot stand at its bottom, with Baskerville near to them. Over-thinning the thins and over-thickening the thicks of their letter, at the cost of making their types too delicate for wear, leading heavily, and printing in glossy ink upon paper of a polished smoothness, they obtained a seductively delusive

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appearance of luxury that even yet appeals to the depraved in taste, but which is tiring to the eye and repulsive to the lover of a quietly dignified page.

Until the eighteen-twenties there was little or no improve- ment. William Pickering (i 821-18 31) began to publish the famous "Diamond Classics," reprints inspired by the produc- tions of Aldus, whose mark he adopted, adding the legend: Aldi Discip. Anglus. These were at first printed by Corrall, of whom nothing more than this would appear to be known, and later by Charles Whittingham I. The first Whittingham's work marked a very distinct advance upon anything then being done, or that had been done for many years, but was by no means equal to that of his more celebrated nephew. In 1829 began the long intimacy between Pickering and CharlesWhit- tingham II. to which the latter was indebted for so much of his taste and ambition as a book-printer. Under Pickering's influence, Charles Whittingham II. raised the Chiswick Press to a pitch of efficiency and a command of material which placed it in the forefront of British book-printing: a position which, under Whittingham's able and enterprising successors, it held for many years.

Whether due to the example of the Chiswick Press or no, there was a general advance in British book-printing, slight but unmistakable, during the succeeding years, one sign of which was an increasing use of Caslon's letter ("old-face") and its adaptations ("old-style"). Apart from this, however, pro- gress went in the direction of a smug hardness and uninterest- ing mediocrity, as in the case of Didot's disciples, French or Scotch, to the last-named being due the "new-face," which has unhappily come to be the accepted letter for scientific works and works of utility. Alongside of these developments went the introduction and spread of "ornamental" or "fancy" types.

Until the latter half of the 18th century, "ornamental" or "fancy" types were practically unknown. In earlier days, of course, the over-florid yet handsome Teuerdankletter had been designed and used for the honour and glory of Maximilian I., but this can hardly be counted in, and — if only because of its excessive employment of kerned letters — found few imitators. Excepting for "bloomers" or decorated initials, fleurons and vignettes,the three standard letters — roman, italic

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and black — were virtually untampered with before about what may be called the Bodoni epoch. But about the time when Bodoni was wreaking his wicked will upon body-type, sporadic attempts began to be made at "variety" upon French and far more frequently upon German titlepages, and in Germany now and then throughout whole volumes. At first, the innovation rarely went further than the addition of a shaded line outside the solid face of a roman or italic letter, or a further touch of eccentricity or spikiness to the jraktur. But it was not long before the solid line of a roman began to be shaded, beaded, rusticated, or bedevilled in some other way — e.g. to give the letter an appearance of being in intaglio or in relief — or the letter itself to be distorted into a tomfool imitation of copper- plate or even of needlework.

When once the time-honoured form of the letter had begun to be meddled with, the dykes were down in earnest, and the movement speedily transgressed the bounds of sanity. New- fangled founts, in which the letter leant this way or that, was wiry to the limit or flowery to the extreme, lengthily drawn out or absurdly squat, curlicued or brokenbacked — one of them appropriately advertised as "chaos-type" — were poured into the market until 1888 and beyond; many of them by French or British founders, but most of them by the more versatile and unrestrainedly inventive distortionists of Germany and America.

Not all of these innovations, it must be allowed, were merely perverse. A few showed signs of a real, if misguided, striving after better things, gleams of what, under other condi- tions, might have been good taste. But the bulk of them were irredeemable monstrosities,wearisome "novelties" of the baser sort, catchpenny attempts at being "different," intended be- fore all else to tickle the jaded palate of an undiscriminating public. They were mainly made use of in "job" printing, for handbills or the like, or in advertisements, as a few of them still are, but many of them found their way into book-printing by way of titlepages, dropped heads, and so on. Those printers who, like C. T. Jacobi in Great Britain or Theodore de Vinne in America, resisted or did not feel the temptation to crowd their titlepages, and sometimes their pages, with a mixture of heteroclite sizes and faces, often adding to the effect with

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rococo or fretsaw "ornaments," might be numbered on the fingers of one hand.

Kegan Paul, writing of "The Production and Life of Books" in 1883, said that "there could scarcely be a better thing for the artistic future of books than that which might be done by some master of decorative art, like Mr. William Morris, and some great firm of typefounders in conjunction, would they design and produce some new types for our choicer printed books." This wish was now on the road to something more than fulfilment; for Morris did not merely design some new types but re-discovered, studied and practised the making of books in all its branches and from the root up.

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Ill

MORRIS IN 1888

Morris came to printing as an all-round craftsman, already a conqueror in many fields. Important as is the place he fills in the history of printing, printing was but one of his activities, as has been seen, and the latest of them at that. This not only tells for his own greatness, but goes far towards explaining his achievement as type-designer, decorator, practical printer, and all-round maker of beautiful books, standing second to none of his predecessors and far above all who have yet followed him.

For years past, when confronted with a new trade and com- pelled to acquire a new technique, his invariable experience had been that he must go back to the days before machinery in order to find the best models, and also the best methods by which he might hope to equal these. It was this experience that nowsenthim to manuscripts and incunabula for his models, and the earlier printers for his methods. At the same time, as will duly appear, he neglected to learn nothing that his own day could offer him.

For his own writings in printed form, he had for a long time been more or less content with a passable adequacy. In this he was helped by his "tidymindedness," to which refer- ence has been made; once they had left his hand, his poems or stories interested him no longer ; they had, as it were, ceased to be his, and what became of them was not his business. But, as always, once aroused to a real need, he resolutely set himself to the task of meeting it; meeting it as a practical craftsman, and not as an a priori theorist.

He was, by nature, neither an innovator nor a reactionary; that which was old was not necessarily good in his eyes, nor

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that which was new to be acclaimed or condemned on the score of its newness. It invariably was the work which counted, and counted for its inherent worth; not its age or the name of the man who had wrought it. Book, picture, tapestry, or piece of furniture, the work stood or fell upon its own merits, without the least regard to the period or the person that had produced it. He protested, for example, against "restoration" of ancient buildings because "the art of that time was the outcome of the life of that time," and therefore could not be re-supplied or amended ; because "the imitative art of to-day is not and cannot be the same thing as ancient art, and cannot replace it"; be- cause ancient buildings "are documents of a wholly past con- dition of things, documents which to alter or correct is, in fact, to falsify and render worthless." But never, never once, be- cause they were old. In the same way, and to the same degree, modern work was denounced where and when it was bad, praised where and when it was good; but neither the one nor the other because it was new. Thus also with methods of work ; that which aided him or guided him in doing the work before him was good, be it new or old; that which hampered him or debased the work was bad : he had no other criterion. He has been accused by one school of doctrinaires of being a reckless Utopian, by another of being a hidebound believer in a dead epoch, the truth being that he offended both by demanding that their doctrines be brought to the test of working practice, and by upholding long-continued everyday experience as the ultimate authority.

In turning to a new kind of work, its attraction for him also lay in the need for or worth of the work in itself, and not at all in any desire for a change. He is frequently spoken of as "ver- satile," but in so far as the word is taken to imply a restless or causeless veering from one occupation to another, or to convey the faintest hint of instability or caprice, it is the least fitting of all possible terms; only in its derivative sense of manysided- ness, and the ability to take up a new craft or trade at call, is it applicable. For an additional art or craft was always accepted rather than sought by him; some workaday difficulty that he alone could overcome, or a fresh demand that he alone could meet, consistently lay behind each extension of his activities. Thus the call for furniture, hangings and curtains, in the days

3i

of Red Lion Square, when tolerable chairs and tables, honest materials and satisfactory colourings were not to be bought, drove him into joinery, upholstery, weaving, dyeing, printing upon cotton and linen. Thus also, the lack of a "decent-seem- ing" book of his own drove him into mastering the many in- tricacies of printing, and of the tributary crafts that have to do with it.

No craft or art was ever dropped by him so long as there was any need that he should practise it, nor did it ever become uninteresting through the study or practice of another. Once mastered, it remained with him as a permanent possession, a matter of deep and continued concern, to which any number of others might be added, but which could be supplanted by none. But here, once more, it was the work that mattered, and not his own skill or his own joy in it. Ready as he was to take up an art or a craft at need, he was equally ready to surrender it, in whole or in part, to any friend or fellow-worker who could and would carry it through as thoroughly and well as himself. Thus he gave over painting to Edward Burne-Jones, architecture to Philip Webb, and much of the work at Merton Abbey to pupils or assistants. At Merton Abbey, of course, he retained the full control of all materials, methods and processes, keeping a vigilant eye upon the product, and lending a hand anywhere and anywhen did he see need.

This absence of jealousy, and readiness to share the work and the joy and triumph of the work with others, was due to an utter lack of self-consciousness, which also goes far to ex- plain the universality of his genius and the tremendous amount of his varied output. By nature, indeed, he was as utterly single- minded as in material achievement he was manysided. To use a cant-word of to-day, his attitude was as completely "object- ive" as that of Shakespeare; or, using a term of his own, he was never for an instant a "go-to-ist." That is to say, he was constitutionally incapable of bothering about his own reactions or emotions, of thinking or saying: "Go to, /will do thus and so ; this or that work is mineV He thought always of the work, this work, or that work, but never of my work ; and condemned "go-to-ism" in others, not only for its immediate effects, van- ity, self-seeking, and so on, but because it led so directly to "see-what-I-can-do-ism," which was bad for one's work.

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WHEN ADAM DELVED AND EVE SPAN WHO WAS THEN TH GENTLEMA

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£-aJ

FRONTISPIECE TO " A DREAM OF JOHN BALL BY WILLIAM MORRIS Drawn by E. Burne-Jones. Engraved by W. H. Hooper. Border by Morris

See-what-I-can-do-ism, in any field of activity, irked him to the point of blasphemy. "Michel Angelo I don't like," said he. "No, I'm hanged if I do, big as he is! It isn't that I blame him for knowing how learned and all-fired clever he was. A chap can hardly help knowing that he knows his work. But he let that good conceit of himself get between him and his work. He couldn't keep his eyes in the boat for thinking about it. Now, you take his Moses, and you can see that Moses himself or what Moses stood for didn't interest him a little bit; or, at any rate, not enough, compared to turning Moses into a peg to hang his own cleverness on. He made of poor old Moses an op- portunity for showing off his knowledge of anatomy and skill of hand. What he really liked was to pile up difficulties for the sake of coping with them, foreshortenings, and bunched-up muscles, and that sort of thing, and he took jolly good care that they were such as everyone could see. It was just as clever of Blondin to walk his rope at six feet from the ground as across Niagara, but the gapemouthed public wouldn't have under- stood that, or paid as much to see it. There wasn't the same chance of seeing him break his neck."

To divert his attention from the work in hand by making him self-conscious, or by betraying self-consciousness, made him acutely uncomfortable, and the discomfort was likely to be passed on. A friend, classed by him in conversation among "teachers," was foolish enough to interrupt by deprecating the term, and was instantly told: "Well, for a learner you're damnably talkative ! ' '

Adapting a text, so that it read: "Seek ye first the glory of the work and all these things shall be added unto you," he op- posed "seek-ye-firsts" to "go-to-ists" and "see-what-I-can-do- ists" as being the true artists. And there was more in this than apt phrasing or a telling antithesis; it expressed the very heart of his creed: work in fellowship, and that alone, realizes the divine in man. To put oneself in the first place is to distort the scheme of things, and open the door to a base form of idolatry, while to barter away the purity of one's art for place, fame or money is to commit the sin against the Holy Ghost. "A painter," said he, "should be as transparently impersonal as a window." That this was a counsel of perfection, of course, he knew well enough; but he held, and held strongly, that the

33 d

mere effort at impersonality goes far towards aiding the under- lying personality to come through. "If a man isn't thinking about himself, he is himself; if he thinks about himself, he's likely to drift into thinking about what somebody else will think of him, and that's fatal. . . . Stick two fellows in front of an apple-tree, neither of whom thinks about himself, and they'll both get the apple-tree, but in their own despite there'll be a difference, and the difference will be that of personality."

Nor had he any sense of higher and lower, either with re- gard to the particular kind of work to be done or to the men who took part in it. The work, of course, must come under the rule into which he had compressed the law and the prophets : ' ' Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful and believe to be beautiful." Note in passing, as a corrective to many silly ideas about Morris, the relative stress upon utility and beauty!

Once the work had answered this requirement, it was worth doing with all one's might, and any man who took part in it, let that part be never so subordinate, if he gave of his best, was accepted and treated as a brother-craftsman and therefore an equal. "To his own workmen," says A. Clutton-Brock, "he was masterful enough at times, but as their foreman and not as their social superior. He lost his temper with them sometimes, but always as man with man, and they recognized one of them- selves when he did so." Thus it had been from the outset of his career, and thus it was at the Kelmscott Press, where every- one from devil to overseer felt pride in being a co-worker, with but not under him, taking his fierily worded criticism or warm praise as they came and were meant, because of care for the work.

This attitude of mind, wholly natural and untainted with condescension, while it enabled him, without thought on his part, to bring out of men more than they had ever imagined to be in them — in many cases more than they were ever to bring out of themselves again — was resented by "see-what-I- can-do-ists" and those whose uneasy egotism it inevitably left unsated. He has even been accused of callousness and an in- capacity for personal friendship by men who — unconsciously, it may be — demanded an appreciation of their personal merit or personal charm that he could not or did not express. The

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truth being that his preoccupation with what was in hand, his own work or that of the man in front of him, would necessarily blind him to an itching self-love that he had never felt in him- self, and could not therefore allow for in anyone else.

To his lifelong and well-tried capacity for warm personal friendship there is no lack of irrefutable testimony, and the artist or craftsman who came into touch with him, not over- mastered by vanity or self-seeking, did not always hesitate on the hither side of idolatry. Indeed, it might almost be said that a man's response to Morris measured the degree to which his work or himself came first in his concern. Approach Morris for information or advice, and he was wholly yours for as long as your honest need lasted; but go to him in the hope of un- deserved praise or some repeatable flattery,and you came empty away, sometimes turning into an enemy on the strength of it. For he did not suffer fools gladly, even when it would have been his interest to do so. A wealthy customer got hold of him once at Morris & Co.'s, worrying and wearying him with a demand for "subdued" colours, until at length he threw open the street door, and shouted : "If it's mud you want, there's lots of it out there!"

It is only fair to say, fair to some who fell away from him, that his own titanic powers, and the conviction formed from his own experience that no craft or art was difficult in the ab- sence of a physical disability — its material might be refractory or the mastery of its technique a matter of patience, but that was all — put an undue strain upon any weaker man who tried to keep up with him ; a strain he had never felt, and could there- fore neither realize nor fully sympathize with.

As he gave, so did he take, teaching and learning with a like spirit and a like restrained impetuosity ; not that there was any man who could give Morris anything like what Morris had to give him ; but have anything to tell him that he wanted to know — and in connexion with work of any kind there was little he did not — he would get out of you all you knew; not seldom far more than you had known you knew. It is pertinent here to recall that a favourite game of his, played with his family and visitors at Kelmscott Manor, was "Twenty Questions," and that Lord Chief Justice Coleridge declared he could have been the greatest cross-examiner of all time. As apprentice printer,

35

somewhat has been said, and more will have to be, with regard to his relations with Emery Walker. Those with C. T. Jacobi of the Chiswick Press will presently call for mention. The secrets of punchcutting he absorbed from Edward P. Prince, and his acquaintance with wood-engraving was added to in talks with W. H. Hooper, though wood-engraving he prac- tised no more and punchcutting he never attempted. With Joseph Batchelor for mentor,he studied the technique of paper- making, making two sheets with his own hand; but, finding that he could rely upon getting what he wanted, did not once revisit the mill. He talked and listened to compositors, his intent eye taking in every movement of their hands, and every detail of their tools, until he knew as much as they did of spacing, justification, and all the rest of it. With pressmen he spent hours, familiarizing himself with every particularity of their doings, from the reason for damping paper in a given way, and to a given degree, to that for a lingering "dwell" when the type had been brought into touch with it. But, again, he never stood at case or pulled a sheet; his trusted fellow-crafts- men were there for that.

There was, however, no theory or hard-and-fast rule in these matters, and he frequently indulged in what he called "the laziness of fiddling over detail." His friend and fellow- member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Thackeray Turner, one day found him spotting the back- ground of a design with dots, and heard him asked why, in the name of goodness, he did not hand that work over to an assistant? "Do you think," demanded Morris, "that I am such a fool, after having had the grind of doing the design, as to let another man have the fun of putting in the dots?"

It has already been said that "relaxation" in the case of Morris was a relative term, and "laziness" as he applied it to himself was that also. When he was "fiddling over detail" or indulging in "laziness," though it did mean in a measure that he was really "having fun," it meant yet more that "the man in the backshop" was busy, and that the next "leaf" of the "arti- choke" was being matured. When it is told of him that he wrote seven hundred verses at a sitting, the story is usually nar- rated as though this were an instance of the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, of inspiration at white heat. As a matter of fact,

36

Morris had composed and perfected the poem, as was his usual way, before ever he set pen to paper, and then wrote it out at a rush to get rid of it. I have often heard a compositor speak of a "take" of Morris's copy as "a fair treat" ; there was hardly a blot, an alteration or an erasure from start to finish, or one un- clear letter. It might or might not have been written by instal- ments, while a dozen other jobs were being carried through, but it read and looked as though the pen had moved swiftly and uninterruptedly, without stumble or hesitation, from be- ginning to end. It may be suggested, parenthetically, that from this method of working comes the spoken quality of his verse, its address entirely to the ear, so that it must be read aloud if its full beauty is to be brought out, which worries the run of critics, accustomed as they are to verse that has been composed and worked over piecemeal in written form, and addressed to the eye like a piece of word-mosaic, as most of it is.

Morris's many-layered mental fertility has been several times referred to, but the indefatigable industry of his "man in the backshop" — who should, more accurately, be spoken of in the plural — had to be seen to be believed in. When he was translating the Odyssey, he was at the same time writing his Aims of Art, his Dream of John Ball, endless notes and articles for the Commonweal, pamphlets and lectures on Socialism or Architecture, as well as turning out design after design for wallpapers, chintzes, glass, etc. He would be standing at an easel or sitting with a sketchblock in front of him, charcoal, brush or pencil in hand, and all the while would be grumbling Homer's Greek under his breath — "bumble-beeing" as his family called it — the design coming through in clear unhesi- tating strokes. Then the note of the grumbling changed, for the turn of the English had come, and he would prowl about the room, filling and lighting his pipe, halting to add a touch or two at one or other easel, still grumbling, go to his writing- table,snatch up his pen and write furiously for a while — twenty, fifty, a hundred or more lines, as the case might be. While his hand was thus busied, the "man in the backshop" was ruminating the next thing; for the speed of his hand would gradually slacken, his eye would wander to an easel, a sketch- block, or to some one of the manuscripts in progress, and that

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would have its turn. There was something wellnigh terrify- ing to a youthful onlooker in the deliberate ease with which he interchanged so many forms of creative work, taking up each one exactly at the point at which he had laid it aside, and never halting to recapture the thread of his thought, or to refer back to that which he had already written. It was as though one had been admitted to the Olympian workshop of an artificer god.

Questioned on his way of working and how it seemed to him, he was at a loss for an answer, and finally said: "Well! You see, one's head is rather like an everlasting onion ; you peel off" the idea you see, and there's another underneath it, and so on." I tried to get him to tell me at another time how a de- sign took shape in his mind, but any sort of introspection was strange and uncomfortable to him, and it was not easy to say. Realizing that the inquiry was not wantonly made, or without an anxiety to understand, however, he was patiently ready to do his best. "When one began," he said, " of course one had to learn all about the nets — you know what they are? — and that sort of thing, just as one had to learn the rules of grammar, and one had to keep them in mind while doing one's 'prentice-work, but that's a long while ago, and I don't think about them any more than I do about grammar. To confess the truth,although I haven't forgotten as much about them as about grammar, I have to dig for them when I want them. I know what's right and what's wrong, but I couldn't always tell why. I look at the space to be covered, and say to myself that it has to be repro- duced on such and such a scale, and the repeats will run in such and such a way, and that a rose or honeysuckle or whatnot would be the sort of thing to suit it, and there the matter ends for the time being. It goes somewhere at the back of my mind, and when it comes up again, it may be as the whole thing, or only the general hang of it and a bit of the detail. Sometimes it seems to come out of the paper of its own accord, misty at first and getting clearer each time I look at it. But whether it comes as a whole or gradually, come it does, and that's all I can say of it."

On another occasion, returning to a point already touched upon: "Inspiration be damned for a yarn! It belongs to the mystery-man's bag of tricks. If you have found work you can

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do, and do it for all you are worth, inspiration will come when it's called for. Mind you, I assume it's work you enjoy doing ! And, of course, nobody's always at his best; and, especially if he sticks at one thing — say poetry — the inspiration — and that, after all, is only to say the impulse — will halt at whiles, to say the least of it. When that happens, he'd be better off if he had something else to go on with. If you have to screw yourself up to writing a poem when the poem isn't there to be written, or flog yourself into chairmaking for the mere sake of your wages, the poem or the chair is pretty well bound to suffer. . . . Don't forget that art, if it mean anything at all beyond sheer honest work well done, means the craftsman's pleasure in following his craft, and the unaccountable quality that gets into his work thereby."

Because he was ready to learn from anybody and every- body who had anything whatever to teach him, old or young, ancient or modern, of high degree or low, and was never back- ward in acknowledging a debt, unintelligent and whitehanded apostles of "self-expression" have denied him originality; just as, on account of his outspoken admiration for the work done during the Middle Age, or of his fierce attacks upon commer- cialism, he has been dubbed sentimentalist by the ecstatics of mechanism. But he took example by his predecessors and in- struction or advice from his contemporaries with an equal and an unfailing appetite, because, as has already been said, he thought of the work first, last, and all the time. When he fixed upon Master Nicholas Jenson the Frenchman for a precedent, it was in order that by study and practice he might come to understand the methods and principles upon which Jenson worked as a type-designer, while tradition was yet fully alive, so that he might apply these to his own practice, rather than in order to imitate Jenson's type, to do which he would have re- garded, and rightly, as a silly waste of time. What need was there to imitate what was there already, to be taken ready-made if that were all?

As to sentimentalism, no fairminded reader can fail to see, alike in his writings upon art and in those upon social reform, that he was practical in the extreme. That is, if it be "prac- tical" to insist upon genuine material and good workmanship; upon wares being honestly made for the use and pleasure of

39

man, not merely or primarily to sell at a profit; and upon such a change in political and social arrangements as would favour- ize, if not ensure, trustworthy products and fair dealing in their exchange. There was no sentimentality in him, nor could he stand it in others. Of a man who gushed about art, he said that "a man who talks about art in that kind of a way is capable of using the word as an adjective" ; and of one who affirmed that he "strove to be one with the universe," he drily remarked: "the danger is, one can't always tell whether one isn't making over the universe until it is one with oneself!" A "twitter- ing female," who thought she was pleasing him by professing to be "raised above the sordid cares" of her household by her absorption in music, provoked the rejoinder that "there is more art in a well-cooked and well-served dinner than in a dozen oratorios" ; and an ecclesiastic who unctuously declared that he followed saintly example in being all things to all men, was told that what he really meant was readiness to be any- thing to any man. Indeed, he never went so near to a John- sonian brutality as when angered by gush or affectation ; though he usually endured in silence, unless the offender were a friend, only breaking out as exemplified when the ordeal had been unduly prolonged.

His attitude towards the Middle Age, again, was not in any way determined by mere sentiment. It was the work of the Middle Age, at once honest and invariably beautiful, that appealed to him, and the colourful vigour, unequalled since, which animated and was met by it. And his unanswerable claim was that an epoch in which such work was done, even when every possible drawback in the shape of disorder and violence had been allowed for, must in some way or other have been a better epoch than our own, for the productive craftsman at any rate. Had he lived until now, by the way, he would have been able to point out that industrialism does not necessarily lead to order and respect for life or property ! That able-bodied non-producers, idle of malice aforethought, are better off nowadays than ever before, if it had any weight at all in his eyes, told against the world of commercialism, and not in its favour.

At no time did he advocate a return to or copying of the Middle Age or any of its methods, even its methods of work,

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jSFTHIS IS THE PICTURE OF THE OLD HOUSE BY THE THAMES TO WHICH! THE PEOPLE OF THIS STORY WENT^fe HEREAFTER FOLLOWS THE BOOK IT J* SELF WHICH IS CALLED NEWS FROM NOWHERE OR AN EPOCH OF REST &fc IS WRITTEN BY WILLIAM MORRIS,*?,*?

a

FRONTISPIECE TO " NEWS FROM NOWHERE " BY WILLIAM MORRIS : KELMSCOTT

MANOR, OXFORDSHIRE

Drawn by C. M. Gere. Engraved by W. H. Hooper. Border by Morris

further than these were eternal and universal in their validity. What he did advocate, in unmistakable terms and with vehe- mence, was that we should learn from the Middle Age what it alone is able to teach us, not revive or imitate it through undis- criminating admiration, and less yet condone its defects of any kind for the sake of its picturesqueness. We should study it in order to find out for our own guidance what conditioned the lofty standard of work to which it attained, and learn how to re-knit the broken threads of tradition, then intact, applying our discoveries to the daily work of our own day, adapting them where necessary to our increased mechanical powers and wider desires.

His objection to machinery, again, was thoroughly prac- tical, not being to machinery in itself but the evil use made of it, and arising from no sentimental prejudice or fanciful ideal- ization of the past. Here also, his attitude was determined by quality of work. Where the employment of machinery entailed no detriment upon the work, either directly or through the enslavement of the men who did the work, he was willing to accept and adopt it without reluctance or scruple. In addition to "plenty of unnecessary work which is merely painful," he frankly owned that there was "some necessary labour even which is not pleasant in itself"; and here, said he, was the legitimate sphere of machinery, going so far as to assert that " if machinery had been used for minimizing such labour, the utmost ingenuity would not have been wasted upon it."

For weaving plain cloth in quantity, that work being monotonous and as well, or better, done by the power-loom, the machine was in place ; but for patterned stuff's, where the weaver could enjoy his work, besides doing it with a freedom of execution and a liveliness of beauty no machine could equal, none but handlooms ought ever to be employed. His type for the Kelmscott Press was cast by machine, as there was nothing to be gained by handcasting that he could see; "and from all I hear, there wasn't much fun in it for the poor devils who jogged and bumped the moulds about." If only the machine could have dealt with his paper and ink, and given him the re- sult at which he aimed, he would have installed a machine "as lief as not, though I'm afraid Collins" — his leading pressman — "would swear and cry his eyes out if he couldn't any longer

41

m^m

! life-..

m*m*M

further than these were eternal and universal in t ir validity. What he did advocate, in unmistakable terms ai with vehe- mence, was that we should learn from the Middl Vge what it alone is able to teach us, not revive or imitate it though undis- criminating admiration, and less yet condone its < fects of any kind for the sake of its picturesqueness. We shoul study it in order to find out for our own guidance what coilitioned the lofty standard of work to which it attained, and -am how to re-knit the broken threads of tradition, then int.t, applying our discoveries to the daily work of our ov . adapting

them where necessary to our increased mechanic; powers and wider desires.

His objection to machine ighly prac-

tical, not to machinery in itself but the eviuse made of

it, and arising from no sentimental prejudice or i iciful ideal- ization of th e also, his attitu ermined by quality of work. Whei I imployment of machicry entailed no detriment upon the work, either directly orhrough the enslavement of the men who did the work. willing to accept and adopt it without relu, • rupl< In addition to "pi f unnecessary work which is merelyiainful," he frankly owned that there was "some necessary. ibour even which is not at in it- • was the legitimate sphere of machinery, going so far as > assert that "if machinery had been used, for minimizing su<: labour, the utmost ingenuity would not ; :n wasted upn it."

For weaving plain cloth in quantity, that vork being monotonous and as well, or better, done by the ower-loom, the machine was in place; but for patterned stus, where the weaver could enjoy his work s doing it wh a freedom

of execution and a liveliness of beauty no machincould equal, none but handlooms ought ever to be employed. His type for the Kelmscott Press was cast by machine, as ther was nothing to be gained by handlisting that he could see; aid from all I hear, there wasn't muchlun in it for the po devils who jogged and bumped the moulds about." If onl he machine could have dealt with his paper and ink, and giv suit at which he aimed, he would have inst-11' lief as not, though I'm afraid Collins"- — "would swear and cry his eyes ouf

41

him the re-

'achine "as

~ma»~

feel the type come home, or pause to let the ink sink in as it should."

"It's the stupid way in which machinery is used that I ob- ject to, and what goes with it. Whatever gives pleasure in the doing — say weaving a jolly pattern — should be reserved for the hand. A weaver at the handloom, so long as he's turning out something that's worth doing, is decently paid and not over-driven, has no bad time of it, I can tell you ! But the other sort of thing, long stretches of calico or unpatterned cloth or fleck-speckled commercial tweed, give that to a machine, and be damned to it! But, mind you, even then, there's a danger. You've got to have somebody to look after the machine, and if he does that all the time, he soon becomes less of a man than part of the machine. Then, the machine means cheapness in one way or another, and cheapness in one way means cheap- ness in another, and once cheapness gets in at the window, quality's likely sooner or later to be thrown out of the door."

He condemned the machine, then, in so far as he did con- demn it, upon two counts: inferiority of product, though this was often less due to the machine in itself than to the profiteer- ing use made of it; loss of pleasure and pride in his work on the part of the producer, and the widespreading degradation which thence ensues. The machine, in short, is a good servant when properly used, but a bad master when used as it is.

That the loss of pleasure on the part of the workman had but small appeal for his more prosperous hearers, he knew only too well, and he therefore stressed it all the more. "The hope of pleasure in the work itself, how strange that hope must seem to my readers — to most of them ! Yet I think that to all living things there is a pleasure in the exercise of their faculties, and that even beasts rejoice in being lithe and swift and strong. But a man at work, making something that he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the ener- gies of his mind and soul as well as those of his body. Not only his own thoughts but the thoughts of men of past ages guide his hands; and as a part of the human race, he creates. If we work thus we shall be men, and our days will be happy and eventful." Elsewhere he wrote : "Men whose hands were skilled in fashioning things could not help thinking the while, and soon found out that their deft fingers could express some

42

part of the tangle of their thoughts, and that this new pleasure hindered not their daily work; for in their very labour lay the very material in which their thought could be embodied; and thus, though they laboured, they laboured somewhat for their pleasure and uncompelled, and had conquered the curse of toil, and were men."

His hatred of commercialism and acceptance of socialism, in like manner, took rise from work, and were not rooted in a reaction to the wrongs of Labour, or due to a doctrinaire ad- herence to the Rights of Man. Though he felt keenly and wrote bitterly of the foul misery that was in his time, and is in ours, the accepted lot of the toiling masses ; though he abhorred the stark injustice of social inequality, and the stupid wastefulness involved in the political domination of class by class, his dis- content had begun in the workshop, dye-room and weaving shed, when he started out to do good work, to produce wares that were honest in material, with a character in them derived from the loving and thoughtful work put into them, perma- nent and clear in colour as well as fertile and rich in design. At every step he took or attempted to take, he was met and hin- dered by debasement of material, dishonesty of method and the degradation of workmen under commercialism. For a long time he strove to maintain the fiction that he was a "dreamer of dreams, born out of [his] due time," and to demand: "Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?" But his own pas- sionate craftsmanship, and resentment against the conditions which destroyed craft-happiness for his fellow-men, thrust him continually forward, and he was gradually driven into taking up an extreme position by a growing realization that nothing worth doing could be done towards remedyingmatters through isolated efforts, through any political measures in- tended to be merely palliative, or through the withdrawal from the world-market of any well-intentioned group or commun- ity. Short of a reform so sweeping and complete as to be spoken of no otherwise than as a revolution, he came at length to see no hope for the revival of craftsmanship, with all that that implies. "As I strove to stir up people to this reform [of the arts] I found that the causes of the vulgarities of society lay deeper than I had thought, and little by little I was driven to the conclusion that all these uglinesses are but the outward

43

expression of the innate moral baseness into which we are forced by our present system of society, and that it is futile to attempt to deal with them from the outside. Whatever I have written or spoken from the platform on these social subjects is the result of the truths of Socialism meeting my earlier im- pulse, and giving it a definite and more serious aim."

As to the coming about or bringing about the revolution that must come, he held his mind open from the beginning to the end. At no time a believer in the employment of armed force, though fearing that the "other side" might resort to it as a means of repression, and thereby drive the workers into fighting in self-defence, and remembering our so-called Re- formation, our Civil War and the French Revolution, with all their bloodshed and cruelty — and, what was almost worse in his eyes, the destruction of ancient buildings and other works of art, the externalized and embodied thoughts and feelings of bygone men — he neither hoped for nor desired anything more speedy than a change of opinion, a growing realization that "fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death," taking shape as it progressed in legislative reform, perhaps, but more certainly and effectively through a steadily altering attitude towards work.

At no time did he regard himself as taking part in the "Labour Movement," with which or with Trades Unions he had never very much connexion or concern, but in a move- ment for the reform of society as an organic whole, from which every man of goodwill had much to gain, whatever his rank or condition; not a movement for the overturn of one class and the uplifting of another, excepting in so far as these might be inseparable accidents of the enfranchisement of Man as a race from the chains of ignorance, unfairness and lack of oppor- tunity. He neither desired nor endeavoured to lessen the amount of work, either in intensity or length of time, that any freeman might have to put into the task of hand and brain; let the task itself be made interesting, and the conditions under which it was performed made something more than merely endurable, and work would once again become a pleasure in- stead of a penalty. Nor, otherwise than as incidental to a decent life, did the question of wages excite him ; the wage-system, indeed, was irredeemably evil, and no amount of amending

44

it would make it other than a makeshift and mischiefmaking method of distributing the rewards of industry ; to end it rather than to amend it must be the sole way of dealing with it. His ideal and aim was always to lessen the non-humanity of labour, in its monotony and lack of inspiration or incentive, and the inhumanity of labour, in its immolation of man to machine, the brutalization which comes of sordid surroundings in factory and home, thwarting the growth and crippling the soul of man, woman and child; to lessen these evils until they disappeared, until the artisan could feel himself once more a freeman and a craftsman, enjoying the unimpeded exercise of his fully- developed faculties, proud of their fruits, and receiving a due share of all the amenities of life.

Harnessing the powers of Nature to "save labour*' — that is, to save the cost of labour for the benefit of the capitalist — had not in any way improved the position of the labourer ; had, indeed, done exactly the opposite. Toiling "consciously for a livelihood, and blindly for a mere abstraction of a world- market which they do not know of," the factory-hands of to- day are in painful opposition to their craftsmen-fathers, who "worked to produce wares, and to earn their livelihood by means of them, and their only market they had close at hand, andthey knewit well." To-day, their market is distant and the consumer unknown to them, and the personal interest in their work and its fate has departed. "Now, the result of their work passes through the hands of half a dozen middlemen; then, they worked directly for their neighbours, understanding their wants, and with no one coming between them." They have lost their freedom in two directions; "people work under the direction of an absolute master whose power is restrained by a trades union, in absolute hostility to that master," so that they are held back on both sides from putting forth what powers they may possess ; whereas aforetime, "they worked under the direction of their own wills by means of trade guilds." They have been set apart as a separate class, herded into the bricken horror of mean streets, and cut off from all natural contact with an unspoilt world. "Now, the factory hand, the townsman, is a different animal from the countryman. Then, every man was interested in agriculture, and lived with the green fields coming close to his own doors. ... In those days, daily life as a whole

45

was pleasant, although its accidents might be rough and tragic. Now, daily life is dreary, stupid and wooden, and the only plea- sure is in excitement, even if that pleasure should be more or less painful or terrible."

That misery was rife in the Middle Ages, as in every age in the world's history of which we have knowledge, he freely ad- mitted, but "it is clear that such misery as existed," said he, "was different in essence from that of our own times ; one piece of evidence alone forces this conclusion upon us; the Middle Ages were essentially the epoch of popular art, the art of the people: whatever the conditions of the life of the time, they produced an enormous volume of tangible and visible beauty, even taken per se, and still more remarkable when considered beside the sparse population of those ages. The misery from amidst which it came, whatever it was, must have been some- thing totally unlike, and surely far less degrading than, the misery of modern Whitechapel, from which not the faintest scintilla of art can be struck."

Robert Steele and W. R. Lethaby, in their Quarterly Re- view article upon Morris (October 1899), say: "It was the taste for order and social harmony, and the love of beauty, feel- ings essentially aristocratic and artistic, that drove him into revolt against the social anarchy which is the result of Whig laissez-faire under democratic conditions, when he compared it with the regulated economy which was the theory of medi- aeval life. Morris wasa Socialist because he rebelledagainst the capitalist system, which imposes uniformity on craftsmanship and treats the workman as a mere unit, and against uncontrolled competition, which sacrifices beauty to cheapness, solid work to seductive shams, and art to machinery. There was, in fact, nothing modern or scientific about Morris's Socialism. He turned to the Middle Ages, because what he detested did not then exist, but he never formulated a scientific scheme of Social- ism. Indeed, it is doubtful if he can be called a Socialist at all : he objected as vigorously to the tyranny of collectivism as to that of capital. We are inclined to hazard the paradox that, if Morris was a Socialist, he was so just because he was so intense an individualist."

His ideal of life as it should and might be is described in his Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere, and in many lee-

46

tures. A thumbnail sketch of it is given, incidentally and as it were by accident, in his Roots of the Mountains : "Thus then lived this folk in much plenty and ease of life, though not delicately or desiring things out of measure. They wrought with their hands, and wearied themselves ; and they rested from their toil and were merry: tomorrow was not a burden to them, nor yesterday a thing which they would fain forget: life shamed them not, nor did death make them afraid."

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IV

APPRENTICESHIP

It so happens that, in the first year of Morris's apprentice- ship as a printer, the Athenaeum — then the leading critical journal in literary matters of the English-speaking world — reviewed his Dream of John Ball, appraising him thus: "Any critic who, having for contemporaries such writers as Lord Tennyson, Mr. Browning, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. William Morris, fails to see that he lives in a period of great poets, may rest assured that he is a critic born — may rest assured that had he lived in the days of the Elizabethans he would have joined the author of the Return from Parnassus in despising the un- academic author of Hamlet and King Lear. Among the band of great contemporary poets what is the special position of him who, having set his triumphant hand to everything from the sampler up to the epic, has now invented a system of poetic socialism and expounded it in a brand-new kind of prose- fiction . . . who never passes into ratiocination or rhetoric, never passes into excessive word-painting or into euphuism, never speaks so loud as to be heard rather than overheard, but, on the contrary, gives us always clear and simple pictures, and always in musical language . . . of him who is the very ideal, if not of the poet as vates, yet of the poet as 'maker' — the poet who always looks out upon life through a poetic atmosphere, which ... is as simple and clear as the air of a May morning?" And the Athenaeum answers its own question by deciding that he possessed "the richest and most varied endowments of any man of our time."

This was the man who now set himself, as humbly and thoroughly as though he had been a raw beginner, to seek out

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FRONTISPIECE TO " A TALE OF THE EMPEROR COUSTANS DONE OUT OF THE ANCIENT FRENCH " BY WILLIAM MORRIS

Drawn by Morris. Engraved by W. H. Hooper

and come to an understanding of the craft and mystery of book-printing. That he spent a full year upon his preliminary studies before turning his 'prentice hand to practising any one of the many branches of the trade, is in itself good and suffi- cient proof of the thoroughgoing care with which he worked. Allowance has once more to be made, of course, for the un- interrupted pursuit of his other activities. Not only did he supervise and actively take part in the industries of Morris & Co., write articles and notes for the Commonweal 'week by week and occasionally for other publications, lecture and speak in many parts of the country for the societies of which he was a member, but produce two romances in the course of the same year, original in style as well as in story, and make of these in their material shape the object of experiments in printing. Formidable as is this total, which might be increased were it worth while, it left him time and energy for getting through an amount of study and thought that would have occupied the full working-year of an ordinary man.

His two new romances, I have said, were treated by him as matter for experiment in printing. In so treating them, he had a threefold aim in view: to see for himself what could be done at the best with existing material and under existing condi- tions; to make sure that no stone had been left unturned in his determined quest for a complete and practical knowledge of book-printing; last and least important, that he might have a book of his own to show at the next Arts and Crafts Exhibition.

Though he had been driven by hard experience in craft after craft into recognizing the Middle Age as the time of times for an exemplar of method, no less than of material or of result, it was not in him to take this or anything else for granted when turning to an unfamiliar field, or to rest content with an a priori condemnation of everything modern. With as pains- taking a scrupulosity as that of Darwin in seeking for facts that would test, or destroy if need be, his great hypothesis, Morris had to make faithful trial of materials, methods and tools that lay to hand in order to know exactly where and in what manner they might be improved upon or put aside. And he had to acquire a technical knowledge of every department of book- printing before venturing to work at any one of them.

That the attention he gave to its printing detracted in no

49 E

way from the literary worth of the House of the Wolfings, the first of the two romances to which allusion has been made, may be seen from the enthusiastic reception it met with and the place it still holds among his works. According to the Athen- aeum, the author of this "superb epic" had invented "a form of art so new that new canons of criticism have to be formulated and applied to it. Without going so far as to affirm that this book is the most important contribution to pure literature that has appeared in our time, we may without hesitation affirm it to be one of the most remarkable. . . . Mr. Morris has here en- riched contemporary literature with a poetic prose of his own, a prose that has all the qualities of poetry except metre ... a style such as only one living man can ever hope to write. So poetic, indeed, is the prose in this fascinating volume that even the verse, fine as it is, seems to fade in the midst of it, as the linnet's voice fades when the blackcap or the nightingale begins."

Disinterested and unwelcomed homage was paid to the book from another point of view. Soon after it appeared, a friend found Morris in one of his explosive moments over a letter he had received from a "fool of a German." The writer, a distinguished archaeologist, said that he had hitherto re- garded himself as being acquainted with all the quellen in ex- istence, from which knowledge might be drawn with regard to Teutonic life in its later tribal stage, when the Romans held Gaul, but that he now found himself in presence of high learn- ing that reduced him to humility. He therefore begged his honoured, illustrious and most erudite colleague to indicate the newly found quellen to which alone he could attribute the miraculous and never-to-be-overpraised fullness and accuracy of the redintegration before him. "Doesn't the fool realize," demanded Morris at the top of his voice, "that it's a romance, a work of fiction — that it's all lies ! Hasn't the pedantic ass ever heard of creative imagination, or known an artist of any kind? . . . Ex pede Herculem, don't you know? . . . Just as old Owen could fill out an extinct bird with only a bone or two to go upon, an artist who knows his business can fill out an epoch on the strength of half a dozen details. . . . Well, more than half a dozen, but all the same . . . !"

For the printing of the book, Morris went again to the

5°

Chiswick Press, of which his friend, C. T. Jacobi, was then the head. He could hardly have discovered a more kindred spirit among working printers, or one who would have devoted so much time and care to inducting him into the details of the craft. With C. T. Jacobi at the Chiswick Press, with Emery- Walker at home, he spent hours in comparing types and papers and inks, as they were then, with one another and with those in use in the early days of printing, as well as in studying the methods of handling and dealing with them in the production of a book.

Curiously enough, and by an undesigned coincidence, the type finally chosen for the House of the Wolfings was the "Basel," in which a trial-page of the Earthly Paradise had been set in i860. This "Basel" type had been adapted from Froben's roman letter by Charles Whittingham II., and used by him in printing a devotional work, the Rev. W. Calvert's Wife s Manual, for Longmans in 1 854. Authorities upon type have hitherto given the date as 1856, but that was the date of the second edition. The punches for it were cut and the type cast by William Howard of Great Queen Street, who had been a seaman and is legendary as an eccentric, but was a fine example of the highly skilled "little masters," now extinct as the Great Auk. It had never been a commercial success, as may readily be understood when its appearance is contrasted with that of the average type of the 'fifties. Its heavy long esses, not used in the House of the Wolfings, and the slanting hair-line of its ees, which were, catch the eye at once, and one realizes how uncon- genial they must have been to a generation that sat upon horse- hair, admired antimacassars, and thought of Martin Tupper's Proverbial 'Philosophy 'as inspired and inspiring poetry.

Time and thought were given to proportioning and bal- ancing opposite pages in such a way as to make the opening the unit, instead of the page, as well as to proportioning and balancing the page in itself. The titlepage was treated in an en- tirely new manner, though it has been so freely imitated since as to have lost all appearance of novelty by now. Up to then, the average printer had looked upon a titlepage as an oppor- tunity for "display," and had prided himself on the variety in size and fashion of the types he could cram into it. Even the best printers had neglected its possibilities, and early printers

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afforded no precedent, so that Morris's originality, on this point at least, must pass unchallenged, as must the simple dig- nity and real beauty achieved through unity of letter and the manner in which it was disposed upon the page.

There was, at first, to have been a block to connect and har- monize the massive title with the lighter imprint, but this gave way in the end to a copy of verses, written to the exact measure of the blank to be filled. This detail has not been so exten- sively imitated, as it is not easy to find a poet who can shape his poem to a given space, and still make it as limpid and spon- taneous as though it had leaped into being as an improvisation.

Buxton Forman tells of meeting Morris by chance at the Chiswick Press: "Presently down came the proof of the title- page. It did not read quite as now : the difference, I think, was in the fourth and fifth lines, where the words stood 'written in prose and verse by William Morris.' Now, unhappily, the words and the type did not so accord as to come up to Morris's standard of decorativeness. The line wanted tightening up: there was a three-cornered consultation between the Author, the Manager, and myself. The word in was to be inserted — 'written in prose and in verse' — to gain the necessary fullness of line. I mildly protested that the former reading was the better sense, and that it should not be sacrificed to avoid a slight excess of white that no one would notice. 'Ha!' said Morris, 'now what would you say if I told you that the verses on the titlepage were written just to fill up the great white lower half? Well, that was what happened !' "

Large-paper copies were printed in accordance with cus- tom, the pages being carefully re-imposed for the sake of bal- ancing them in a larger opening. No sooner did Morris see the final result, however, than he vowed that never again would he fall into the "large-paper" trap, as both type and page of type had been dwarfed and greyed by the great expanse of sur- rounding white.

His next experiment was made upon the Roots of the Moun- tains, a longer, stronger and more assured work, declared by Robert Steele to be "perhaps the finest story of Northern life ever written. In this romance the poet touched the high-water mark of his prose style; its archaisms, if such there be, are exactly necessary for the expression of his thought, and the

52

narrative itself is exciting and well-planned." As a concep- tion, Buxton Forman said that the Roots of the Mountains is "no whit inferior to the House of the Wolfings. There are those who award it the higher place. . . . For consistency of detail, these men and women leave nothing to desire; for realization of place, personality, costume and institution, the work is un- surpassed; and in the one matter which in this case is very important, the invention of battle incident, Homer himself could not afford to give the modern poet points." Theodore Watts-Dunton described the fighting in which the Yellow Men are finally defeated and their power destroyed as "one of the most splendid battlepieces in all poetry."

This was also printed at the Chiswick Press, and in the same type as its predecessor, except that the e with a slanting hair-line was replaced by an e in which the hair-line is level. This change, made in deference to a widespread protest, was immediately regretted by Morris, as may be seen from the fact that he gave the hair-line of the e in his "Golden" type a decided slant.

There is a difference in the pages also, which are even more carefully balanced, while dropped heads, headlines and num- bering in the top corner have been abandoned. Shoulder notes have replaced headlines, and the pages are centrally numbered at the foot. This makes a decided improvement in the open- ing, and the precedent then set up was followed in all the books printed at the Kelmscott Press. The titlepage is like that of the House of the Wolfings, and bears a copy of verses, again written to measure, but again betraying no trace of having proceeded from anything else than an unpremeditated burst ofinspiration.

Instead of large-paper copies, a number were printed on a specially made Whatman paper, and bound in Merton printed linen. The publishers, Reeves & Turner, were puzzled by the new departure, and much perturbed as to the wording of their advertisement, and in the end announced a "superior edition of 250 copies." A certain amount of the special paper was left over, and eventually used for the earlier book-lists of the Kelmscott Press.

A translation from the Icelandic, the Story of Gunnlaug Wormtongue, was also put in hand at the Chiswick Press, the

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type chosen for it being a black-letter adapted from one of Caxton's. But Morris lost interest in it before it had gone very far, being by now much too deeply absorbed in type-design- ing, papermaking and so on, to take it seriously. Work on it dragged along until near the end of 1 890, and though it was finally printed, it was never published. A few copies were bound, and are to be found in private hands, but the bulk of the edition remained in sheets until after Morris's death.

In addition to being absorbed in his preparations for the Kelmscott Press, it is probable that "this master of all the lead- ing crafts that can be named," as Buxton Forman called him, unconsciously realized that his term of apprenticeship was drawing to a close, and that it had become a waste of time for him to bother about printing anything in any other type on any other paper or in any other way than his own.

Of Morris's studies at this period, W. R. Lethaby, him- self a man of no mean record, has written that they were "not of the superficial look of things, but of their very elements and essence. When . . . first producing textiles, Morris was a prac- tical dyer; when it was tapestry, he wove the first pieces with his own hand ; when he did illumination, he had to find a special vellum in Rome and have a special gold beaten ; when he did printing, he had to explore papermaking, inkmaking, type- cutting, and other dozen branches of the trade. His orna- ments and the treatment of Burne- Jones's illustrations were based on his personal practice as a woodcutter. Morris was no mere 'designer' of type and ornament for books, but probably the most competent book-maker ever known. Indeed, it is a mistake to get into the habit of thinking of him as a 'designer' ; he was a work-master — Morris the Maker !"

It was as a maker of books that he studied and experimented, not merely as printer or designer of type, or as both together. He was these and more. By the time he turned to making his own books — or even before that, by the time he entered upon actual preparation of the materials for his book-making — he possessed an intimate knowledge, and could appreciate the capabilities, of each and every material that goes into a book, either by itself or in relation to the others and their final em- bodiment in the book, was familiarly acquainted with each and all of the techniques which converge upon book-making, and

54

had acquired some considerable degree of working experience in each. No one material was taken singly and by itself, nor any one operation out of the entire process of making a book from beginning to end.

To use his own words, he studied book-printing, and "began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters. I have always been a great admirer of the calli- graphy of the Middle Ages, and of the earlier printing which took its place. As to the fifteenth century books, I had noticed that they were always beautiful by force of the mere typo- graphy, even without the added ornament, with which many of them are so lavishly supplied. And it was the essence of my undertaking to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type. Looking at my adventure from this point of view, then, I found I had to consider chiefly the following things: the paper, the form of the type, the relative spacing of the letters, the words, and the lines, and lastly the position of the printed matter on the page."

So had he studied and experimented, and when the time came, so did he work.

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V

PREPARATION

In describing Morris's work, while he was getting his materials and tools together and preparing for the production of printed books, we shall in the nature of things be driven to deal with one thing at a time, and can only try to bear in mind while doing so that he dealt with all things abreast. He subordinated no material to another, no operation to another, but each and all of these to the book. Though we shall have to start with his type, and go on to his paper, ink, etc., it is throughout neces- sary to remember that he did nothing of the kind.

This is all the more necessary for the reason that some who quite honestly thought themselves to be following in his foot- steps, or carrying out his teaching, have begun by designing a fine letter, and had then to seek, not always with success, for ink, paper, and the rest of it, with a view to the type and its individual beauties. Others have started with a fine paper, planning all else to do it justice. Examining his work in detail, and unwarned, it would only be too easy in these days to think of Morris's type, for example, in the abstract, comparing it with some ready-to-hand standard or some ideal of our own, without reference to all the other components of his books, or the conditions under which they were produced.

Nor, if it comes to that, should any one of his books be judged in isolation or for itself alone. Each in its turn was the sum of the material and skill at his disposal, and an essay to- wards realizing that which is never wholly to be realized: "for you know all art is compact of effort, of failure and of hope, and we cannot but think that somewhere perfection lies ahead, as we look anxiously for the better thing that is to come from the good."

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FROM WILLIAM MORRIS S DRAWING FOR ENGRAVED TITLE PAGE FOR KELMSCOTT PRESS I 893

Three types were designed, cast and used at the Kelmscott Press: the "Golden," "Troy" and "Chaucer," named from the books for which they were intended. A fourth was par- tially designed, but neither finished nor named. Of these, the "Golden" was an English or 14-point roman; the "Troy" was a Great Primer or 18-point black-letter; the "Chaucer" was a Pica or 12-point reduction of the "Troy." The un- completed fount was a gothicized roman. We shall return to them presently.

For all three founts, the punches were cut "with great intelligence and skill," as Morris justly says, by Edward P. Prince, who was in constant consultation with Morris while at work on them. From what I can remember of the matter, it would seem that punchcutting in his hands, though the instru- ments used might be of greater precision, was essentially un- changed as a process from that followed through by Garamond or Howard. First came the cutting of the counter-punch — whence "counter" for the interior whites of the letters. Then the wrought-steel blank was screwed into a special vice, struck with the counter-punch, and the metal outside the face of the letter cut and filed away. When the face had been trued — in Howard's day this was done upon an oilstone, the punch being held upright in the angle of a special square — the punch was duly tempered to the proper degree of hardness, and was ready for the striking of the matrix. The dates of cutting were : "Golden," January-December 1890; "Troy," June-Decem- ber 1 891 ; "Chaucer," February-May 1892.

All casting was done at the Fann Street Foundry, then in the hands of Sir Charles Reed & Son, Talbot Baines Reed being Managing Director. As has already been noted, the casting was mechanical; this being the sole intrusion of the machine into the work of the Kelmscott Press, apart from sew- ing thread and that sort of thing.

As an example of the pitfalls that await an historian, I may cite a pencilled note in Talbot Baines Reed's own copy of the Glittering Plain, now in the Technical Library of the St. Bride Foundation Institute: "The types for this book were cast at the Fann Street Foundry from matrices produced from punches cut by French under Mr. Morris's personal inspection and from his designs. The letters were modelled chiefly on those

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of Jenson and the early Venetian Roman printers." And the slip is all the more notable from the fact that a holograph letter from Morris himself to T. B. Reed has been pasted into the book by Reed, the postscript of which is: "Mr. Prince has done most of the lower-case letters of my black type."

After deciding upon a roman letter to begin with, and select- ing Jenson as teacher, Morris began to work upon his type in December 1889. Miss May Morris tells "how the first type was designed." "Mr. Walker," she writes, "got his people to photograph upon an enlarged scale some pages from Are- tino's Historia fiorentina, printed in Venice by Jacques Le Rouge in 1476, and pages of all the more important fifteenth century Roman types; these enlargements enabled Father to study the proportions and peculiarities of the letters. Having thoroughly absorbed these, so to speak, he started designing his own type on this big scale. When done, each letter was photographed down to the size the type was to be. Then he and Walker criticized them and brooded over them; then he worked on them again on the large scale until he got every- thing right. The point about all this is — though it may be scarcely necessary to dwell on a rather obvious thing — that while he worked on the letters on this large scale, he did not then, as is often done with drawings for mechanical reproduc- tion, have the design reduced and think no more about it; it was considered on its own scale as well; and, indeed, when the design had passed into the expert and sympathetic hands of Mr. Prince and was cut, the impression — a smoked proof — was again considered, and the letter sometimes re-cut. My father used to go about with matchboxes containing these "smokes" of the type in his pockets, and sometimes as he sat and talked with us, he would draw one out, and thoughtfully eye the small scraps of paper inside. And some of the letters seemed to be diabolically inspired, and would not fall into line for a while, and then there were great consultations till the evil spirit was subdued."

While at work, he had Jenson's own models to refer to; indeed, he was rather adapting these to his purpose with aid from Jenson than imitating Jenson himself. With manuscripts for a starting-point, Jenson helped him on his way but did not furnish him with a goal to reach and be at rest. As he had

already done in so many other crafts, he was laying hold upon tradition, and "it is no longer tradition if it be servilely copied, without change, the token of life." Indeed, if his letter be com- pared with that of Jenson, it will be seen to be more Gothic in feeling ; faintly, perhaps, but perceptibly so.

By mid-August, 1 890, eleven punches had been cut to his satisfaction, and on August 2 7th he enclosed "a specimen (over- inked) of as far as we have gone at present" in a letter to F. S. Ellis. In October he wrote the same friend: "I have all the lower-case letters, and have been designing ornamental letters — rather good. I think." By the end of December, the whole fount had been cut and was being cast, except for the upper- case E and N. These missing letters were not ready until the beginning of February 1 89 1; as may be seen by their absence from the trial-page of the Glittering Plain, pulled on January 3 1 st. The complete fount consisted of eighty-one letters and sorts, including punctuation-marks, figures and tied letters. There were, of course, no "cock-ups" or "superior sorts" — miniature letters or figures above the line — nor any accents.

He exulted over the trial-page as a token of success, but was unsatisfied, and work had little more than begun to go smoothly at the Press when he set himself to designing the "Troy" fount. This was more or less based upon the types of Schoeffer, Zainer and Koburger. He was delayed by illness, but his hand was in, and when started he not only bettered his teachers but worked more quickly, taking half the time for the "Troy" that he had done for the "Golden."

When the resources of his press had revealed themselves, and he felt free to plan his greatest achievement, the glorious Chaucer, he was faced by the need for a smaller letter than either the "Troy" or the "Golden." As a black-letter would be more fitting than a roman for such a book, he decided upon reducing the "Troy," and so produced the "Chaucer." Each of these two later founts contained the same number of letters and sorts as the "Golden." One or two other sorts were added afterwards ; e.g. a leaf to supersede the "blind V as a paragraph mark.

Still unsated, if not unsatisfied, he made some experimental designs for a gothicized roman, based upon the first type of Sweynheym and Pannartz, but did not go far with it. He

59

admired their type greatly: the Press had grown into an enter- prise, however, and had intensified the already tremendous pressure of his daily work ; then, though neither he nor anyone else realized it in 1893, his physical powers were failing. Re- peated attacks of what was called in those days the "Russian" influenza, had undermined his magnificent constitution, and laid him open to the insidious progress of the, as yet unsus- pected, affection from which he died. Had it not been for all this, the nameless fount would certainly have been completed, and would probably have been followed by others ; how many, and of what kinds cannot even be guessed at now; all we can be sure of is that his fertile strength would not have been allowed to go idle.

In the course of his researches, the paper used by the earlier printers and their successors had been as minutely studied as their types, and while he was experimenting upon the House of the Wolfings and the Roots of the Mountains he had exhaustively acquainted himself with all the papers then at his disposal. Of modern papers, those which most plausibly promised to be permanent in material and colour had not the surface and tex- ture he required, while those which came anywhere near to giving him what he wanted in these respects were unable to stand the tests to which he put them. There was nothing for it, then, but making or causing to be made a paper of his own.

The history of paper, as he regarded it, had run parallel to that of type; as papermaking had grown into importance as a trade, and the demand for paper increased, so the average of quality had been lowered. And, again as with type, the lowest point in the worth of book-paper had been reached in the first half of the 19th century. John Murray complained of its deterioration in 1 824, and it went far lower than it was then, when the commercialized application of science enabled paper- makers to handle materials which could only be made use of after the very life had been bleached out of them. There are luxury-books, printed in the later 'sixties, that can be broken across one's knee like a piece of rotten wood, and paper is now being used which will go the same road at as great a pace.

It is not altogether a question of "hand-made" paper, though paper that is to be permanent in substance and colour

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is exceptional, to say the least of it, when made by machine. The difference between paper made throughout by hand in the oldfashioned time-devouring careful way from linen rags, and paper made by machine — or even many so-called "hand-made" papers of to-day — is very closely analogous to that between a serge or tweed woven on a handloom from long-staple, unused, unmixed wool, and a commercial serge or tweed woven by machine from shoddy with an admixture of just enough new wool to hold it together. And even if the material were pure to begin with, it has been hurried through the processes of bleach- ing and making with the aid of chemicals, until the purity of its material is little more than a talking-point.

For paper such as Morris required there is but one pos- sible material — unmixed linen rags — no other fibre in the world being aught but a substitute. The longer and finer the fibres, and the more complete their felting while wet, the stronger will be the sheet of paper when dry. But the material is by no means all; time and care must be given to every stage of its handling: it must be thoroughly fermented, thoroughly boiled and pulped, untouched by a chemical bleach, lifted slowly and carefully by hand, sheet after sheet, by a skilled and unhustled workman, employing a mould in which the wires have not been woven with the monotonous regularity that gives its uninteresting appearance to so much of the modern "hand-made" paper ; and then it must be very gradually dried, without artificial heat. In this connexion, as in all others, a desire for speed is the enemy of true efficiency. Not that Morris believed in taking things too easily, of course; here, as always, it is the work and its welfare which counted for him : the time spent upon it should be fully enough, but not more than enough, to ensure its well-doing.

Another commercial demand — the demand for mechani- cal uniformity and a superficial appearance of perfection in the product — is all out as mischievous as that for speed. Pulp which is lifted by hand has not and cannot have the uniform thickness or dead regularity of surface — at the cost of homo- geneity in substance — obtainable in that which has been spread by machine. But this is not a defect when the paper is dealt with by hand, and printed upon with good ink. It is, indeed, far more of a virtue, for it allows of a play of light and

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shade upon the page which gives it life, without any detriment whatever to the unsophisticated clearness of the type-impres- sion.

After much searching, Morris concluded upon a Bolo- gnese model of about 1473, Italian papers having been from the beginning what Fuller found them to be in the 17th cen- tury: "Venetian being neat, subtle and courtlike; the French being slender and slight ; the Dutch thick, corpulent and gross, not to say sometimes also bibulous, sucking up the ink with the sponginess thereof. ' ' And he also found a papermaker after his own heart, the late Joseph Batchelor of Little Chart, near Ashford in Kent, whose mill he visited with Emery Walker, and convinced himself that Joseph Batchelor might be left to pursue his experiments alone, being fully as enthusiastic and thoroughgoing — where paper was concerned — as was Morris himself. After he had reached this point, as has been said, he never revisited the mill, though he kept up a written corre- spondence until 1895.

In a letter to Morris, dated January 26th, 1891, Joseph Batchelor says: "I am to-day sending five quires of paper marked S, and also i\ quires marked H, and I wait your further instructions. . . . The paper no doubt will be quite usable and is Antique, but is not so like the Venetian you left with me as I wish, and as I intend if I make another lot. What I have made will take about a week to finish after I hear from you which you like best, S or H."

It will be noted that the model paper is here spoken of as being "Venetian" — another trap for an historian! — but this was only a use of the traditional name for a good Italian paper.

As to which of the two, S or H, was preferred there is no record, but both were used for the Glittering Plain, as the size proved to be unsuitable to the Golden Legend, which was intended to have been the first book produced.

Three papers altogether were made for Morris by Joseph Batchelor, no other paper than these being used for any of the Kelmscott Press books. Named from their watermarks, de- signed by Morris, they were known familiarly as the "Flower," the "Perch" and the "Apple." The flower was a convention- alized primrose; the perch had a leafy sprig in his mouth; and the apple was an apple. In each case, the distinguishing mark

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stood between the initials W. M. The first deliveries of each, as invoiced from the Mill, were :

"Flower." February 12, 189 1. ioreamsAntiquePott,i6" x 1 1", 12 lb. 480 sheets. ,, April 22, 1 89 1. 1 o reams Antique Medium,

16" x 22", 25 lb. 480 sheets.

"Perch." February 17, 1893. 1-1 6/20 reams Antique Perch, i6£"x 23", 28 lb. 480 sheets.

"Apple." March 14, 1895. 25^ reams Apple Antique, i8j"x 1 2 1", 1 8 lb. 480 sheets.

One experimental paper tried at the Press, but made for Emery Walker years before, was much too hard to be usable. In order to see what could be done towards an absolutely pure and ideally made paper, it had been made from pure new linen rags without admixture of any kind, especial care being taken over the trituration of the rags, fermenting the pulp, and all the rest of it. The outcome was a paper of wonderful beauty, but with which nothing could be done. Hard and resilient as spring-steel, tough and translucent as horn, it was dangerous to handle when dry, its deckle-edge cutting like a razor, was un- foldable, and no amount of soaking would render it soft enough to be printed on.

As had been the case with Morris's fabrics, wallpapers, stained glass, and so on, the new papers quickly found imi- tators, not all of them over-scrupulous as to quality. On October 30th, 1 895, Joseph Batchelor wrote Morris: "I find that other makers are imitating our Antique Handmade paper. For our protection, and as a means of giving my friends a guar- anteed genuine article, I propose calling the paper the Kelm- scott Handmade, subject, of course, to your approval. This does not apply to watermarking in any way, but to the wrapping and labelling of the paper." This proposal was at once and willingly agreed to, and the same class of paper was made for a good many customers with their own watermarks, but always under the style of "Kelmscott Handmade." The Kelmscott papers are still being made by Batchelor & Son, but with the firm's own watermarks.

After paper, vellum. As has been told in its place, large- paper copies became impossible after the House of the Wolfings^ and a "superior edition" of the Roots of the Mountains had been

^3

printed upon a specially made Whatman paper. No similar course could now be followed, as the Kelmscott Press books were to be printed on the best paper that the world could then show. Vellum was therefore the sole possible resource; and, besides, to print upon vellum would mean re-knotting another thread of the medieval tradition. With what remained over from the stock long ago laid in for calligraphy, there was enough whereon to print six copies of the Glittering Plain. When more was asked for, no more was to be had from Rome, the entire output having been firmly bespoken by the Vatican, and there was the Golden Legend to be provided for, to say nothing of lesser books. Excepting that one Italian maker, Morris could hear of nobody in any country who could or would supply the kind or quality of vellum he needed. He had almost concluded upon a direct appeal to the Pope, begging him to release a supply, on the ground that the Golden Legend was a book in which he ought to be interested, when one of his friends told him of a man who might be willing to try his hand upon turning out the kind of vellum he required. This was Henry Band, of Brentford in Middlesex, who already made binding-vellum, as well as parchment, drumheads and banjo-heads. To him went Morris in his usual way, and after a few trials and failures they met with success — too late for the Golden Legend^ however. Specially made from carefully chosen skins of calves not yet six weeks old — after that age, their skins must go into the tanpit, becoming the raw material of gloves, boots, etc. — made specially thin, specially surfaced and not faked with white lead, the Kelmscott vellum was an exceedingly costly product. But this last was a detail that Morris cared nothing about, so long as the material answered the requirements of the work to be done.

Later on, when the growing needs of the Press outran the capabilities of the Brentford works, recourse was had to another firm, William J. Turney & Co. of Stourbridge in Worcester- shire, to help out. "Kelmscott" and "Roman" vellums are still being made at Brentford, but the Stourbridge concern "gave up the manufacture many years ago, although the de- mand for vellum still exists."

His experience as a dyer had prepared Morris for a fair amount of trouble with his ink, but he met with far more than

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ijrcipic LeeejsroH YpeRjvns

PS

GRGCe mftYkOJvi meaeN brethren two, Of wbicbe that oon was called Danao, Chat many a son e bath of bis body wonne, Hs swicbe false lovers of te conne. Hmong bis sones alle tber was oon Chat aldermost be lovede of evericboon. Hnd wban this child was born, this Oanao Shoop htm a name, and called htm Lino* That other brother called was Sgiste, Chat was of love as f als as ever htm liste, Hnd many a dogbter gat be in bis lyve ; Of which he gat upon his righte wy ve H dogbter dere, and didc her for to calle Tpermtstra, yongest of hem alle ; The whicbe child, of her nativitee,

AN INITIAL WORD FROM THE " CHAUCER

even he had anticipated. Indeed, his ink was more trouble- some than anything else, "as one might have known, seeing that those damned chemists have a freer hand with it!" In all matters of art, he held that the chemist had wrought infinite mischief, without having a single gain to his credit; and if this belief had not been warranted by previous experience, it most certainly was justified by what happened now. After endless trials, two inks — one English and one American — were found, and it looked for a while as though these might answer, though the English one had an undertone of red and the American an undertone of blue. And the attitude of all the English and American makers appeared to be: "Take it or leave it; what's good enough for others is good enough for you!" It was not until Jaenecke of Hanover came forward, however, and offered an ink said to be made of the old-fashioned pure materials that his troubles were over.

None of the others could understand that linseed oil was indispensable, any other being a cheap and harmful substitute; that "science" with its chemicals might simulate but could not produce the same organic changes in the oil as those which went on while it slowly matured in keeping; that after it had been thoroughly matured, and then reduced by boiling to the proper consistency, chemicals might free it from grease more effectively than the rule-of-thumb treatment of pre-"scientific" times with stale bread and raw onions, but "freed" it while doing so of much else; that after the turpentine, boiled separ- ately until, on cooling it on paper, it broke sharply and without falling into powder, had been mixed with the boiled oil while both were still warm, no chemical treatment or addition of this or that would atone for a shortening of the six months' ripen- ing the mixture must undergo, at the least, before being boiled up again; that no other pigment than an organic lampblack, animal for choice, must enter into the ink, depth and tone of colour being regulated by the quantity of lampblack and by nothing else; and, finally, that the lampblack must be ground into the mixture of oil and turpentine until absolutely impalp- able. To men who were accustomed to taking a chemical- ized short-cut or the use of a chemicalized substitute wher- ever that was possible, and could reckon upon disposing of their product by the ton, such a demand appeared to be

65 f

a mad one, especially on the part of a relatively negligible buyer.

Jaenecke stepped in where they did not care to tread, and Morris, though he had cause to deplore and fear the influence that Germany had exerted and was then exerting upon Eng- lish art, thought and letters, was in this instance compelled to rely upon the methodical thoroughness and artistic probity of a German manufacturer. It is true that Jaenecke was a fellow- socialist, but I cannot remember whether Morris knew this or no. The ink was good in colour, and proved to be stable when tested ; if it showed any trace at all of weakening under months of daylight, it betrayed no unpleasing undertone. It was of the proper consistency ; when a pinch of it was taken and the finger and thumb parted, it might be drawn out into a thread of over an inch long; yet it was thin enough to adhere to the paper without an undue pull upon its surface or an undue drag upon the type ; and it never worked foul, clogging the type or dirty- ing the impression. That in the average press-room of those days — or in these? — a little soft soap would soon have got into it is another matter altogether; quickness of working was not asked for at the Kelmscott Press.

With all its merits, Morris did not feel altogether satisfied with it; he had had no opportunity of examining its ingredi- ents or supervising its manufacture. There was nobody within reach to work with, and his days were much too thronged to allow of a lengthy trip to Germany, or he would assuredly have taken up the study and practice of inkmaking with all the in- tensity and industry he had given in their time to the mastery of dyes and dyeing. But his days were already overfilled, and his utmost energies taxed, by work to which he had committed himself, and he was forced for the time to content himself with testing the colour and stability of the ink by the severest means at his command. The hand of death fell on him before he could find a chance of doing more.

He was a born decorator, and the decorations of his books were an integral part of their original conception ; they were decorations in the truest and fullest meaning of the word, organically harmonious parts of a designed page, and never extraneous thereto, added or appliques as "beautification." He could not have resisted the temptation to enrich his books with

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ornament, or anything else that he made, for his mind and hand were irresistibly architectural in all things, and unceasingly fertile so long as he was awake. As chairman of a meeting, his notes of the discussion were unconsciously covered with sketches of flowers or fantastic scraps of design ; and the top of a white-wood table, which used to stand on the platform of the meeting-hall attached to his house at Hammersmith, was filled from end to end and corner to corner with striking hints of beauty or grotesquerie that were, in their own way, his com- ments on what was being said.

"I have watched Mr. Morris designing the black and white borders for his books," writes W. R. Lethaby. "He would have two saucers, one of Indian ink, the other of Chinese white. Then, making the slightest indications of the main stems of the pattern he had in mind, with pencil, he would begin at once his finished final ornament by covering a length of ground with one brush and painting the pattern with the other. If a part did not satisfy him, the other brush covered it up again, and again he set to to put in his finished ornament. This proced- ure opens up another idea of his, that a given piece of work was best done once for all, and that all making of elaborate cartoons, and then accurately copying into a clear finished drawing, was a mistake. There was not only a loss of vitality which would come by the interposition of more or less mechanical work, but a drawing would not come right a second time, and would always to his eye bear the impress of a copy instead of a thing self-springing under his hand. It is difficult to realize the ex- tent to which he felt this, but ... he seemed to have the idea that a harmonious piece of work needed to be the result of one flow of mind; like a bronze casting in which all kinds of patching and adding are blemishes. . . . The actual drawing with the brush was an agreeable sensation to him ; the forms were led along and bent over and rounded at the edges with definite pleasure; they were stroked into place, as it were, with a sensa- tion like that of smoothing a cat . . . thus he kept alive every part of his work by growing the pattern, as I have said, bit by bit, solving the turns and twists as he came to them. It was to express this sensuous pleasure that he used to say that all good designing was felt in the stomach."

Of titlepages, borders, decorative initials and marginal

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ornaments, he designed a total of no less than six hundred and forty-four in little more than six years. In his earlier books, of course, he had to make do with a smaller and less varied selec- tion than he had at his disposal before the end. This was made matter of complaint at the time by ill-informed critics, who took the repetition of a design for a measure of economy, not allowing for the fact that his enterprise was an experimental one and not in the least a commercial speculation, or knowing that no single penny was ever charged against the Press or any book printed thereat for any of Morris's own designs. For other people's work he paid, and paid well, but counted in his own as part of the fun. Another silly complaint was that the decorations did not "fit the text," or, in other words, were not symbolic of its meaning; to this he would have retorted, as he did when one of his romances was taken for an allegory, that when he had anything to say, he said it in so many words and plainly; that his decorations were not intended to be illustrative or emblematic, but exactly decorations and no more.

He started with one hand-press, an Albion, to which two others and a proving-press were added later on. Except for the change to iron from wood, and the substitution of levers for thescrew, this press wasessentiallysimilar to Caxton's; indeed, at the end of an hour or so, Caxton would have been comfort- ably at home with the Press as a whole. As has been said, Morris would have been ready to install a machine if it would have done what he wanted, which it would not, or fitted into his enterprise. No machine then existing, however, could have dealt with his paper and ink in the manner he desired ; and it is to be doubted whether there be one to-day. Then, even upon the point of cost, advantage lay on the side of the hand-press. Though the machine be cheaper for long runs, for two or three hundred copies it is not, even when its far greater prime cost and interest thereon are left out of account. When each and every sheet is pulled with as much care as an etching, being then tried over for the minutest fault, and replaced if it be in the least defective, the machine is yet further handicapped. On the hand-press, one, two, or five sheets may be pulled at the same expense as though they were part of a thousand, which is very far from being the case with a machine,

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The type was inked with rollers, not pelt-balls, as it would have been if Morris were merely imitating old methods. Rollers distribute the ink more evenly and quickly than pelt- balls did,even good sticky ink, over heavy type and strong-lined woodcuts. Then, with rollers, there is less risk of "monks" and "friars" — patches on which the ink is too dark or too light for the rest of the page — though, as the Kelmscott pressmen were in the front rank of their craft, this risk would not have been a great one in any case.

Upon another point, that of the impression, there is an irreconcilable difference between admirers of machine-work and those who hold with Morris in his love of and belief in the human hand, armed with the simplest possible tools. Printing by hand on the oldfashioned hand-press, upon damped paper which rests upon a relatively soft bed, each character leaves a dent in the paper which ought to be only just perceptible when the paper has dried again. To get rid of this denting, which did not suit his distorted type, shiny paper and varnish-laden ink, Bodoni dried his printed sheets between heated copper plates under pressure. The machine, with its hard bed, leaves an impression on the surface of the paper but no depression in the paper, and this has come to be taken as an added beauty, while a favourite word of condemnation for the older method is to speak of its "embossing" the page.

"Witness has been borne against Morris," wrote Frank Colebrook in the Printing Times , "in regard to what is called the embossing of the back of the page, an evidence that the other side of the page we are reading is also printed upon. The effect is displeasing to most eyes, and it detracts from the vividness of the letter which is being read, to the degree to which it detracts from the whiteness of the intervening space between the words. I don't think this concomitant of the hand-press, with its enormous vertical pressure, is really grati- fying to Morris, however indulgently he may look upon it for its reminiscences of old-world books. It is simply the lesser of two evils. If a perfect, dense, deep black is not to be obtained without the drawback of the embossing of the back of the page, well, on the balancing of advantages, he chooses to have the more legible letter. He, indeed, procures so deep a black that it can afford the sacrifice of a little white in the contrasting

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spacing. ... A good deal, and perhaps too much, has been said about this back embossing by critics of the Kelmscott. They should put aside any idea that it appears in Morris's books simply because he finds it in other books. If he were an imi- tator for imitation's sake, he would copy the catchwords of old volumes and the old long form of the small s. He adopts neither of these." This is the commonsense view of a practical up-to-date printer.

To talk of "embossing" at all, of course, is misleading, to say the least of it ; every decent pressman does his best to mini- mize the inevitable denting. But, as Morris so often pointed out in other connexions, trying for the utmost attainable per- fection in handwork results in something very different indeed from attaining mathematical precision by means of a machine ; in the one, there is human effort, life\ in the other, there is long-distance calculation and the interposition of a feelingless metallic efficiency between the hand and its work, which in matters of art means death.

I have spoken of the difference between machine-worship- pers and believers in the human hand as an irreconcilable one ; and irreconcilable it is until the mechanically minded realize that, while there is room for them and to spare in the world of material necessities, there is none for them in the world of art, where the human brain and hand attempt an unattainable per- fection, and find their joy in the attempt. It is, after all, the difference between those who play football for the sake of the game and those who play it for the sake of the win ; between those who play bridge as an intellectual stimulant and recrea- tion and those who play it with a sordid eye upon the stakes. To the mechanically minded, irregularity in thickness of paper and relative inequalities of surface in the printed page are un- condonable defects; to Morris and his like they are signs of living effort, and therefore easily to be pardoned and put up with, even if they are not to be sought for and admired.

It is, after all, the old quarrel between the Gothic and the Renaissance. To those who condemn the mechanical short- comings, as they hold them to be, of Morris's printing, the work of the French, English and Italian Primitives, the glori- ous beauties of Santa Sophia and the whole Byzantine tradition, the spirited strivings of pre-Pheidian Greek sculpture, or those

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of the great builders of the 13th and 14th centuries, would necessarily appear to be barbarous, puerile, inept.

And it is to be remembered that the inevitable denting was in Morris's mind when he designed his type, as it was in that of Caslon. Print from Caslon's type upon modern paper with a modern press, contrast the effect with that of the same type in Caslon's own specimen-sheets, and the loss is seen to be enor- mous. So, too, with Morris's "Golden," and still more with his "Troy" or "Chaucer," when treated in any other way than the Kelmscott Press way.

This brings me to the question of reproductions. Even the best conceivable reproduction does an injustice to its original, and is to be put up with in the absence of the original; to be taken as an appetizer towards the study of that original, and not as a substitute for it. To reproduce a Morris page, or any other Morris design of any kind, in the true sense of the word reproduce^ is, indeed, impossible in the absence of identical material and an identical method of handling it. Less yet is it possible to imitate them to advantage. They are to be treated as Morris himself treated the work of his predecessors, ad- mired and loved for their own sake, and studied for that which may be learned from them, but not imitated. Imitation is, in any case, unintelligent, the recourse of none but the cowardly in art or the unscrupulous in commerce, anxious to be in the fashion or follow the market.

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VI

THE MASTER-PRINTER

Now that nearly thirty years have gone by since the Kelmscott Press ended its work and passed into history, that its repu- tation has grown higher with time, and its importance more and more widely recognized, the apparent insignificance of its beginnings can only be realized with an effort, and it seems incredible that its rapid growth and ultimate repute should have been wholly unforeseen.

Yet, when it first opened its door, the front-door of a tiny cottage, nobody — and, least of all, its founder — anticipated any such development as that which led, in the seven years of its activity, to the production of no less than fifty-two works in sixty-six volumes, one of them twice printed, ranging in size and moment from the mighty Chaucer down to the dainty little Gothic Architecture^ counting in all up to 18,234 copies, and representing a turnover of more than £50,000. Nor did Morris dream that what he was doing would at once and for ever affect the printing of books throughout the civilized world ; that within a year he would be hailed as the Master- Printer of his age by Theodore de Vinne and other authori- ties; that State printing-offices, like those of Portugal and Russia, were to print special volumes in his honour; or that the books to be printed by him were henceforth to be fought for in the auction-room, and held in high esteem among the choicer treasures of great libraries. He foresaw nothing of all this, and thought of his "adventure" as an experiment in book-making for the mere sake of seeing what could be done.

His original idea, it will be remembered, had been to have

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no more than a composing-room of his own, all press-work to be done at Emery Walker's offices in Clifford's Inn. As his knowledge of printing grew, however, and his practical interest in its working details deepened, he began to see that there were far too many technical risks and difficulties involved in such a plan ; and that, in addition to these, there was the fact that printing at a distance from his home would make it much harder for him to watch over the work as it proceeded.

On January 12th, 1891, therefore, his type and paper being nearly ready for delivery, a cottage was taken at No. 1 6 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, a few doors eastward of his resi- dence. The necessary furniture and fittings had been ordered beforehand, and the Kelmscott Press came into being. That it should be thus named was inevitable; whatever came near to Morris's heart must be named after Kelmscott Manor, near Lechlade on the Upper Thames, of which he had written : "It has come to be the type of the pleasant places of earth, and of the homes of harmless, simple people not overburdened with the intricacies of life; and, as others love the race of man through their lovers or their children, so I love the Earth through that small space of it."

He had offered a partnership in the new undertaking to Emery Walker, who, with his usual modest self-effacement, declined what he felt as an honour. From beginning to end, however, he acted as and virtually was a partner in all but name, taking his full share in the labours, cares and anxieties involved, as well as in the immaterial dividends that were paid in pleasure and the credit for good work well performed.

One upstairs room of the cottage was fitted with racks, cases, imposing-stone, etc. ; another housed the single press, bought secondhand ; the rooms on the ground-floor were util- ized for stores. William Bowden, a recently retired master- printer of the old school, who had printed News from Nowhere for Reeves & Turner, was to have been the entire staff, acting as compositor and pressman by turns. It was made evident, even from the start, however, that there was too much work in sight for one pair of hands, and he was joined a week or two later by his daughter, Mrs. Pine. William Henry Bowden occasionally dropped in to help his father, and was regularly added to the staff on February 18. Before March was out,

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another addition was made, a pressman named Giles, who left when the first book was finished.

"One of my earliest recollections of William Morris," says W. H. Bowden, "is of the starting of the Press. When the type came in from the founders, he was very anxious to help lay it in the cases; but not having served his time to the business, more often than not put the type into the wrong box. It was very amusing to hear him saying to himself: 'There, bother it ; inthewrongboxagain!' But he was perfectly good-humoured, and presently ran off and came back, bustling up the path — and in my mind's eye I can see him now — without a hat, and with a bottle of wine under each arm, with which to drink the health of the Kelmscott Press. And, without ostentation, I think I may say that there must have been considerable virtue in that wine if the Kelmscott Press is to be judged by its works, which in so short a time established such a world-wide repu- tation!"

Writing to a friend at the time, after telling him the good news that the Press had made a start, and rejoicing thereat, Morris in the next breath confesses to an involuntary recoil that is illuminative of the man : "When I saw my two men at work on the press yesterday, with their sticky printer's ink, I couldn't help lamenting the simplicity of the scribe and his desk, and his black ink and blue and red ink, and I almost felt ashamed of my press after all!"

Caxton's translation of theG olden Legend 'was to have been the first book printed, and the "Golden" type had been de- signed for it, but when the first lot of paper was delivered it was found to be too small for the purpose. Only two pages, out of over a thousand, could be printed at a time, and Morris, im- patiently desirous of handling a finished book from his own press, resolved to put a smaller book in hand to go on with. The Story of the Glittering Plain, which had appeared in Nos. 81/84 of the English Illustrated Magazine, but had not yet been published in book form, was available and of the required length. After a slight revision, this began to be set up at once.

Some decorated initials had already been designed for the Golden Legend by Morris, and had been engraved by George F. Campfield, an old friend of his, a pupil of Ruskin at the Working Man's College, and the first employe to enter the

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service of Morris, Faulkner, Marshall & Co. These, though rather large for the page of the smaller book, would do to go on with, but a new border was necessary. This was at once designed by Morris, and engraved by W. H. Hooper, and on January 31st a trial-page was pulled amid great excitement. As has already been noted, the upper-case E and N had not yet been received from the founders, and do not appear in this page. The lower-case g was found to be unsatisfactory, and was at once discarded and replaced.

William Harcourt Hooper, who thus came into connexion with the Press, was one of the last of the great wood-engravers who were at work before any photographic or other mechani- cal method of reproduction had yet been dreamed of. They took to and were trained for wood-engraving as a trade, but for such of them as were artists it became an art; their starting- point and training were those of the craftsman, and they were consequently free from the tendency to mannered self-assertion which is the besetting sin of wood-engravers nowadays, when the craft of wood-engraving having been killed out as a craft, they must of necessity and in their own despite be go-to-ists to some extent. In the earlier part of Hooper's career, he had engraved Sir John Gilbert's drawings for the London Journal, and from 1850 onwards those of Tenniel, Fred Walker, Leech, du Maurier, Keene, Millais, Leighton and others for the Illus- trated London News and for Punch. He had been living in comfortable retirement for some years, but could not resist the lure of exercising his art once more upon such tempting material. He now offered his help, and from this time until the Chaucer had been completed had as much as he could do to keep up with an increasing demand upon his willing services. It is a question as to whether he or Morris were the more for- tunate in their conjunction. Without Hooper, the work of Morris and Burne-Jones would not have been done the justice it deserved and received. Without his association with the Kelmscott Press, Hooper and his earlier work might by now have been forgotten.

Twenty copies of the Glittering Plain were to have been printed for distribution among Morris's personal friends. There was as yet no thought of offering any for sale, nor did Morris desire that any public notice be taken of what he still

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regarded as a privateand personal experiment, an "adventure" of which the success or failure from his pointofview was neces- sarily indeterminate as yet. Rumours with regard to the new press had begun to get about, however, and on February 2 1 st, the Athen<e #/#announcedthat : "Mr. William Morris is getting his press into working order. The printing of the Golden Legend will be preceded by that of . . . the Glittering Plain. A very limited number will be printed as the first issue of the Kelms- cott Press, by which name Mr. Morris calls his newenterprise." This gave rise, to Morris's outspoken annoyance, to a great number of inquiries and many pressing requests that copies be made available for purchase. After much heartburning, and with a certain amount of misgiving, he finally decided to print what then seemed to him the very large number of two hundred copies; twenty, as before, for his friends, and a hun- dred-and-eighty for sale through his regular publishers, Reeves & Turner. His misgivings were not in the least with regard to the possibility of selling so many copies, which was already assured, but as to whether the Press was as yet sufficiently well organized and prepared to do the work as he wanted it done, and especially as to whether a pressman could print the same sheet so many times over at a stretch without succumbing to the monotony of his task, and failing to exercise the same scrupulous and minute care throughout. Besides, the initials having been designed for a larger page, he could not at once reconcile himself to their use for a smaller one. However, all his objections were overcome; the first sheet went to press on March 2nd, and thenceforward the work went steadily on.

If Morris had resented the Athenaeum s first notice of the Press, his annoyance may be imagined when the same paper, in its issue of April 4th, published a series of paragraphs, founded upon what he had regarded as a frank and confidential talk with a friend, in which the Press and his projects in con- nexion therewith were fully described. "The Glittering Plain" said the Athenaeum, "will be published by Messrs. Reeves & Turner at a net price. Only two hundred copies will be struck off, of which 1 80 will be for sale, and four or five copies on vellum." The immediate effect of this announcement was that Reeves & Turner were overwhelmed with orders and in- quiries, and that the 180 copies on paper were sold out within

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the next few days, as well as two of those upon vellum. This in spite of the fact that no price had been stated. No price, indeed, had yet been fixed.

Now that it had to be done, the price for paper copies was fixed at two guineas, and that for vellum copies at fifteen guineas. These prices covered little more than the actual cost of the sold copies, after an exceedingly moderate allowance had been made for their proportionate share of overhead ex- penses. Depreciation of plant was not reckoned, nor the cost of gift copies; for Morris, as the Press was his own private affair, an experimental venture entered upon for the sake of turning out books worth looking at, and not for pecuniary profit, these were matters which concerned him alone, to be paid for out of his own pocket. Later on, when the Press had grown too big to be thus treated, and the book-loving public had shown that it was more than ready to pay fair prices for its products, the friends and assistants who took charge of the business side of things looked out against his losing money, seeing no reason for his being out-of-pocket in addition to giv- ing away his personal work — and such work ! — for nothing.

Anonymous attacks began to be made on him almost at once, nevertheless, for "preaching Socialism and going away to prepare books which none but the rich could buy." Apart altogether from the fact that, so soon as the Press had been got into running order, books were printed and sold at prices which brought them well within the reach of others than "the rich," it must again be emphasized that Morris founded his Press as a personal experiment, in order to see what could be done at his own expense in the way of producing a decent book, and that he had never contemplated the sale of any book what- ever, at any price, until forced to do so by finding that there was a real and widespread demand for his books, and that people were prepared to pay for them. Then, being a sens- ible man — and, as he was proud of being, not only a manufac- turer but a shopkeeper in the true medieval way; a "poetic upholsterer," as Lord Grimthorpe dubbed him, to his delight — he, quite naturally, did not snap his fingers at the proffered assistance towards making his experiment a success.

Here are the actual prices charged from first to last: one book at £20 ; one at £9, 9s. ; two at £6, 6s. ; four at £$ , 5s. ; one

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at^4j4s-> twoat ^3, 3s. ; fifteen at £2, 2s.; fifteen at 30s.; four at 25s.; four at 21s.; three at 15s.; one at 12s.; four at 10s.; fourat 7s. 6d.;andoneat 2s. 6d.

As the editor of the Printing Times, Frank Colebrook, a practical and experienced commercial printer, pointed out, Morris was animated by the same motives in preaching Social- ism and in founding the Press : "He sets up his press, not really to make money, whether out of the rich or out of the poor, but to produce a book as beautiful as he can make it. When he has paid a high price for his paper . . . when he has used black ink at about 10s. a pound; when he has designed his three types and had them cut ; when he has paid fair wages to his workmen, from whom he does not require a longer week than forty-six- and-a-half hours — nor, indeed, bind them down to any speci- fied time — he is not able to sell the product of all this for a less sum. And what a service he renders to workmen everywhere in demonstrating that people will lavish money to buy books upon which master-printers and workmen have lavished care !" And he sarcastically comments: "This dreamer of dreams positively trades and makes money; lavishes it on the needy, no doubt; but the fact remains, he makes money, while the fitness of things demands that from the moment of his start in business, he, the poet, shall be borne softly and serenely away towards the vast waters of the Insolvent Sea! His success is a paradox, almost an impertinence. Commonsense inclines to resent it!"

"It has frequently been urged against the Kelmscott Press that its usefulness as the pioneer of a new movement has been largely impaired by the high charges Morris made for his books," A. L. Cotton said in the Contemporary Review. "The fact is, of course, that Morris made no pretence of publishing cheap books, and the sale did no more than compensate him for the heavy expenditure of time and money which he in- curred. Paper, ink, binding were the best procurable, to say nothing of the ornaments and decorations, and he could hardly have charged a smaller sum for his volumes than he actually did."

According to the colophon, the Glittering Plain was fin- ished on April 4th, but this was naturally the date on which the last forme was locked up ; the last sheet had still to be printed,

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and the book to be bound; the actual date of publication was May 8th. The average interval between colophon-date and publication-date was, in the case of octavos, about a month ; in that of larger books, longer. In the case of the Dream of John Ball (May I3th-September 24th), it was the frontispiece by Burne-Jones which delayed matters; this had to be re-drawn under the artist's direction from that prefixed to the first edi- tion, Morris's border designed for it, both of these engraved, and the blocks printed from, after the body of the book was off the press. Other cases of delay were: News from Nowhere (November 22nd, 1892-March 24th, 1893), kept back for frontispiece, from drawing by C. M. Gere, with border by Morris, depicting the old manor-house on the Upper Thames after which the Press was named ; the Wood beyond the World (May 30th-October 1 6th, 1 8 94), which also had to wait for its frontispiece; and the Well at the World's End (March 2nd- June 4th, 1896), the last sheet of which had to stand by until a press was available, two being fully occupied upon the Chaucer and a third upon the Earthly Paradise.

The Well at the World's End, by the way, was longer in hand than any other book, even the Chaucer, being "in the press" for over three years. Trial-pages, including one in a single column, were set up and pulled in September 1892, and the first forme went to press on the 16th of the following December. The ordinary edition was then being printed for Longmans at the Chiswick Press, and the Kelmscott Press edition was set up from the sheets of this, which was ready for publication in 1894, though not actually published until October 1896, being held back in order that the Kelmscott Press edition might be the first. How to account for the length of time during which the Well at the World's End was in the pressisnoteasy after so manyyears, but part of itwas due to the fact that, according to the original scheme, A. J. Gaskin was to have illustrated the book, and when this idea had been aban- doned, Burne-Jones's four designs were long in hand. Then, many other books were in hand, and Morris was designing a profusion of ornaments for them, doing a good deal of trans- lation, writing his Water of the Wondrous Isles, and was not idle in other ways. His "tidymindedness," already referred to, had probably something to do with it; the book had been

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written, and to that extent was gone from the forefront of his mind; new tasks encroached upon his attention as they came up, one after another — the Chaucer more than all. Until the very end, each and every book in its turn was a high adventure, offering new problems and therefore a renewed excitement, and a glance at the list of books printed will serve to show that there was no lack of "adventures" between 1892 and 1896.

At some time during March 1891 a trial -page of the Golden Legend 'was set up, pulled and approved, and the book was put in hand. In April came the first delivery of the larger size of the "Flower" paper, and it was possible to send the first sheet to press. Vellum of the proper size and in sufficient quantity was not yet available, and the Golden Legend is the only important book printed at the Press of which there are no copies on vellum. Before the Golden Legend was finished, and in time for the Recuyell of the History es of Troye, a supply of the necessary vellum was being furnished by Henry Band. By May 1 ith, fifty pages of the Golden Legend were in type, and the first sheet had been printed. But for an accident, it would have been printed sooner. Morris went into the Press one morning, towards the end of April, and found his unhappy staff in the depths of despair; a deal slab, overladen with page- galleys, had collapsed, and the outcome of many days of labour had gone into "pye." As W. H. Bowden told the story: "Morris is as serene as ever. 'Oh, then, this is what you call pye?' he exclaims. If there must be pye at the Kelmscott Press, he seems interested and almost pleased to see it; to be in at the death. It is all in the day's work. 'Ah, well,' he says, 'we must put it straight. I came in to tell you that you must take a holiday on May 1st, Labour Day.' And with that he turns on his heel and away." The accident, be it noted, was due to faulty material and not carelessness, or "serene" would hardly have been the word that fitted.

No sooner was the Glittering Plain all up than Poems by the Way was put in hand. Upon this and the Golden Legend, the three compositors were fully occupied until the end of May, when the Press moved to a new abode.

On May 8 th, the Glittering Plain, the first book to be printed at the Kelmscott Press, and the only book to be wholly printed at No. 1 6 Upper Mall, made its public appearance.

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COLOPHON FOR QUARTO BOOKS OF THE KELMSCOTT PRESS

Booklovers were delighted with it, not only for its own sake but as a herald of better things to come. Morris himself was less pleased with it than might have been expected; as an experi- ment he had learnt much from its making, and there was a thrill in handling his first completed book, but he saw and felt the points upon which it fell short of his ideal far more keenly than those upon which it might be called a success.

Two things, at least, had now been proven by experience: that a good pressman might be trusted to retain the freshness of his interest over the pulling of three hundred copies; and that there was what somebody called at the time a "ready-made Morris public" for at least that number. Three hundred copies was the number fixed upon for Poems by the Way, and became the standard number for an average book, only being exceeded in special cases.

Another thing that had come to be obvious was that a larger staffand increased accommodation must at once be pro- vided, if work on the Golden Legend 'were to proceed at a reason- able rate, and especially if a succession of smaller books were to be produced while it was in progress. Then, Morris's appe- tite had been whetted, and he was dreaming of bigger things, designing his "Troy" type, having the "copy" prepared for Caxton's Recuyell of the History es of Troye, so that it should be ready as soon as the type was available, and already talking of a Chaucer. The original cottage was given up, therefore, and larger premises taken at No. 14 Upper Mall, next door to it. "Sussex Cottage," the new home of the Press, and that in which the main part of its work was to be done, was half of a large old family-mansion, partitioned off, of which the other half, "Sussex House," was occupied by the photo-engraving works of Walker & Boutall. The whole mansion, re-united, is now in the hands of Emery Walker, Limited. No. 1 6 re- verted to its original use as a private dwelling, and it is thus occupied at the time of writing.

William Bowden definitively retired when the move was made. W. H. Bowden became overseer, and several new compositors were engaged; Thomas Binning, late of the Commonweal, being among them. Binning was elected father of the chapel; he was a staunch trade-unionist, and it was probably due to him that the London Society of Compositors

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approached Morris, asking him to unionize the Press, in spite of the fact that it was outside the Union district, and that no obligation lay upon him to do so. His reply was to the effect that the Press was not a commercial enterprise, that he already paid higher wages for shorter hours than those recognized by the Union, that the matter was one for his men to settle as they chose, and that he would bring no pressure to bear upon them either in favour of the proposal or against it. When the Union authorities approached the men, the latter discussed the whole question, in chapel assembled, and agreed to go in as a "shop" but only as a "shop." That is to say, there must be no discrim- ination against non-union men, who must go in on the same terms as the others who were already members, and also that Mrs. Pine must be enrolled with all the rest. No woman had ever yet been admitted to the Union, and its authorities ob- jected to setting up a precedent on the point. The men stuck to their guns, however, and carried the day. Mrs. Pine duly becamethe first woman-member of the L.S.C., though she did not long enjoy the honour, as she followed her father into re- tirement soon afterwards, but she had made her name historic and opened the way for others.

Poems by the Way went to press during the following month, and the last forme was locked up on September 24th, the book being published on October 20th. It was the first book to be finished at No. 14, and the first printed in black and red. The Golden Legend, of which the first volume was finished on October 1st, was printed entirely in black, as the Glittering Plain had been, and as the following were to be : The Nature of Gothic, Biblia Innocentium, the Life of Wolsey, and the first (but only the first) volume of Shelley's Poems. Two books only were printed in three colours — black, red and blue — Laudes B.V.M. and Love is Enough. All others were printed in black and red. Wilfrid Blunt's Love Lyrics and Songs of Proteus has the initials in red, at Blunt's express request, but the experiment was not repeated, as Morris did not care for the effect produced.

A second press was bought in November, as work on the Golden Legend was dragging along, and books were beginning to get in one another's way. There were so many that Morris wanted to put in hand by now, and he could not bear that work

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should be hurried. W. H. Bowden describes his attitude to- wards the work, as it was then and all the way through, from the standpoint of an employe : "What sort of man was Morris to work with? Well, if all employers were like him, we should hear of no more troubles between employers and employed ! He was generous and fair, and not indifferent to the feelings and welfare of those who served him. His idea was that a man should not be a working-man as we understand the term, but that he should be a workman in the best sense of the word ; that he should take a high interest in his work; that he should have good surroundings ; the very best materials to use ; and should not be harried at his work by the everlasting thought of how the j ob was to pay him. The spirit of competition never entered the doors of the Kelmscott Press. Everyone had plenty of time allowed him, so that he might put forth his best effort. No man ever detested a botch more than William Morris ; he was a firm believer in the oldfashioned maxim that if a thing is worth doing at all, it should be done well. I recollect once telling Morris that a certain typographical correction, if done accord- ing to his directions, would take a long time. His reply — and it was characteristic — was: 'I don't care: if it takes three months, it must be done !' He knew no such word as 'can't.' He had a ready way with difficulties, and often turned a seem- ing difficulty into a real advantage. From the nature of the work we had many difficulties to contend with; but when a difficulty had been surmounted, his hearty: 'I like that! It is just what I wanted!' was sufficient reward for the previous trouble and tediousness. He was a man of splendid energy, and it did one good to come in contact with his fine breezy nature." As a contrast in points of view, the verdict rendered by the head of a large commercial printing works, with some preten- sions to artistic leanings, whom I once took over the Press, may here be cited. He watched the compositors carefully setting, and still more carefully justifying, line after line; looked with a discontented eye at the pressmen needfully pulling sheet after sheet, minutely examining each one to see whether it were up to the mark; and as he left, summed up his impressions: "We-e-11? That's all very well for Mr. Morris, but there isn't a man here that would be worth a penny an hour to me after he'd been here for a week ! "

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New Year's Day, 1892, saw the first delivery of the "Troy" type, and a trial-page of the Chaucer was immediately set up in it and pulled. The letter proved to be much too large for the purpose, and Morris at once decided to have it reduced from Great Primer ( 1 8-point) to Pica ( 1 2-point). This third fount, the "Chaucer," made its first appearance in the list of chapter- headings prefixed to the Recuyell of the History es of Troye, pub- lished on the 24th of November. It had begun to be delivered in July, however, in which month a trial-page of the Chaucer had been set up in it and pulled, and the form of the Chaucer as it now is finally decided on.

The History es of Troye was the second of the five Caxton reprints, of which two were edited by F. S. Ellis, and three by the writer. Those edited by F. S. Ellis, the Golden Legend and. the Order of Chivalry, in deference to the editor's tastes and desires, were, as nearly as might be, textual and literal repro- ductions of Caxton's editions. The three others, the Historyes of Troye, Reynard the Foxe and Godefrey of Boloyne, were differ- ently treated, as Morris wished them to be regarded as Kelms- cott Press editions, and therefore to be amended where this was desirable. Caxton's text was to be taken as a basis, but not looked upon as archaeologically sacrosanct. It was to be col- lated with Caxton's originals, and corrected where need was, mistranslations being put right and omissions filled in, care being taken to preserve the style and flavour of Caxton in doing this. When we came to the Godefrey of Boloyne, Morris decided that the original spelling need not be rigorously adhered to, as Caxton was an erratic speller, following no discernible rule, and that we were consequently free to retrench or add a letter where the justification of a line could be improved ora "river" avoided thereby.

Hence has arisen a legend that may as well be put an end to. The Godefrey of Boloyne was reviewed in the Academy by a certain German philolog, who addressed himself to the task as to one of his Vorschungen, painstakingly counted up and enumerated every divergence from the original text, even the most minute, stigmatizing each and all of them as printer's errors. His version of the facts found acceptance here and there, and I recently came across the latest form of it in a newspaper para- graph : " It may be of interest to mention that William Morris,

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when he began his reprints at the Kelmscott Press, did not know that a reader was required to correct the compositor's work. After the production of one of the early Kelmscott books, Mr. Morris found that he had allowed several misprints to pass, and he then, upon inquiry, discovered the existence of the printer's reader, and engaged one. It is probable that the collation of the first book printed at the Kelmscott Press with its original would disclose enough mistakes to entitle the work to rank among the curiosities of literature."

In this farrago of nonsense there is hardly one