A House of Air. Hermione Lee

but at length sits down by Arthur, so that both of them are facing the golden sunset to which John’s back is now turned, he pulls at the oars ‘sturdily,’ exerting his strength for them in silence. These small everyday victories of the will lead up to a disastrous failure, the furious and destructive letter, and the despairing attempt to redeem it by a postscript—‘tell Clara I wrote kindly to you.’

      Arthur, on the other hand, the ‘saint’ of the novel, is shown indulging himself in the sweetness of his dreams and the horror of his nightmares, and even when he becomes the centre of consciousness this self-indulgence is obvious. Clara’s love for him is founded, in the Chaucerian mode, on pity. When he reads John’s letter, he is afraid. He lies to Clara, who against her better judgement accepts the lie. Arthur is, in fact, almost without will power, while John, in his blundering way, understands keenly the importance of the will. ‘Nobody does anything,’ he tells Mrs Mason, ‘except because he likes it. I mean to say, even people who have given up most to please other people—but then, they’re all the better people, to be pleased by what’s good rather than by what is bad.’ And he has ‘a feeling, not very pleasant, of not being listened to.’

      In 1872 Samuel Butler published Erewhon, Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, and George Eliot, Middlemarch. All of these seem very far removed from the unfinished taletelling on blue paper. But when Morris told Louie Baldwin that he was impatient at having to deal with prose, he underrated the poetry of his story. This lies in the interrelationship of the three journeys—the passage of a summer’s day, the first walk upstream to the paradise of the farm, and the crucial turning point of John’s adolescence. The June prologue of The Earthly Paradise opens (also in the meadows of the Upper Thames)—

      O June, O June, that we desired so,

      Wilt thou not make us happy on this day?

      Across the river thy soft breezes blow

      Sweet with the scent of beanfields far away,

      Above our heads rustle the aspens grey,

      Calm is the sky with harmless clouds beset,

      No thought of storm the morning vexes yet.

      This is the exact poise of the novel, between past darkness, present happiness (John when he first goes to Leaser is ‘happier than he was last year’), and the coming unknown discontent. And so John, at seventeen, stands on the confines of his own home, with ‘the expectant longing for something sweet to come, heightened rather than chastened by the mingled fear of something as vague as the hope, that fills our hearts so full in us at whiles, killing all commonplace there, making us feel as though we were on the threshold of a new world, one step over which (if we could only make it) would put life within our grasp. What is it? Some reflex of love and death going on throughout the world, suddenly touching those who are ignorant as yet of the one, and have not learned to believe in the other?’ Mackail quotes this passage in part, but dismisses the novel as ‘certainly the most singular of his writings.’ Jane Morris’s comment on the Life, however, is interesting: ‘You see, Mackail is not an artist in feeling, and therefore cannot be sympathetic while writing the life of such a man.’

      Introduction to the Journeyman Press edition, 1982

       ‘Whatever Is Unhappy Is Immoral: William Morris and the Woman Question’

      A protector by nature, Morris felt for women tenderness with hardly a hint of patronage. When he was at work on The Earthly Paradise he disliked writing about the thrashing of Psyche, and ‘was really glad to get it over.’ His care for his wife extended to her tedious sister, and his affection for his handicapped daughter, who got so dreadfully on Janey’s nerves, was described by Mackail as ‘the most touching element in his nature.’ Called upon for advice to a deserted lover, he suggested: ‘Think, old fellow, how much better it is that she should have left you, than that you should have tired of her, and left her.’

      Tenderness and responsibility, of course, are not the same as understanding, still less a recognition of equality. It can be fairly said, however, that as soon as his own personality defined itself, Morris began to treat women as people. Quite certain, from his own experience, that pleasurable work was necessary to happiness, he tried to find out what they could do. Embroidery became, under his persuasion, their natural activity. It was a queen’s work, and also a peasant’s and guarded against the threat of idle or empty hands. Mary Nicholson, who kept house for Morris and Burne-Jones in the 1850s, was perhaps the first to learn. Morris stitched, she copied his stitches. ‘I seemed so necessary to him at all times,’ she said—this, if unconsciously, being part of the persuasion. During the early years of his marriage—‘a time to swear by,’ wrote Georgiana Burne-Jones, ‘if human happiness were doubted’—Morris and Janey worked together on English embroideries, unpicking old pieces to see how they were done. In the Seventies he admired and promoted the work of Catherine Holliday, who remembered that ‘when he got an unusually fine piece of colour he would send it off for me or keep it for me, and when he ceased to dye with his own hands I soon felt the difference.’

      Yet Mrs Holliday and her skilled colleagues were for the most part executants rather than designers, and no better off in this respect than the ‘paintresses’ of the Potteries. This was a limitation of Morris’s own mind. Writing in 1877 to Thomas Wardle about a figure designer for high-warp tapestries, he says he has ‘no idea where to find such a man, and therefore I feel that whatever I do I must do chiefly with my own hands…a cleverish woman could do the greeneries, no doubt.’ On the administrative side, May took over the management of the embroidery section from 1885 onwards, but there was apparently never any suggestion that she should become a partner in the Firm.

      There is not much evidence, in fact, of what Morris thought about women in the professions, or in public life. He worked, of course, side by side with them in the Movement, and made a strong protest at the arrest of Annie Cobden-Sanderson, but Mrs Besant tried him sorely not only, I think, on account of her Fabianism, but because she was Mrs Besant. By the time Georgie Burne-Jones entered local politics, ‘going like a flame’ through the village of Rottingdean, Morris had ceased to have much interest in ‘gas-and-water socialism,’ or in anything short of total change. In that same year (1884) he watched the haymakers, men and women both, distorted and ugly through overwork, and dreamed of the outright battle that would be needed to restore the fields to the labourers. But might he not, in any case, have agreed with Yeats that a woman in politics is a windy bellows? In an unpublished letter to Bruce Glasier he allowed himself some tart remarks about the Woman Question:

      [B]ut you must not forget that childbearing makes women inferior to men, since a certain time of their lives they must be dependent on them. Of course we must claim absolute equality of condition between women and men, as between other groups, but it would be poor economy setting women to do men’s work (as unluckily they often do now) or vice versa.

      Old Hammond, in News from Nowhere, undertakes to discuss it, but becomes evasive. There are no women members of Parliament in Nowhere, he says, because there is no Parliament.

      Ruskin, in his strange treatise on woman’s education, Of Queen’s Gardens (1865), gives her the distinctive powers of ‘sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision,’ to which Morris would have added perspicacity and strength. That strength he greatly respected—he told his sister Isabella, who worked in the slums of South London, that she practised what he could only preach—and he depended perhaps more than he knew on his wife, and more than he could ever express on Georgie Burne-Jones. There is a confusion of viewpoints in the later poems and romances, where, as E. P. Thompson puts it, ‘the mournful Pre-Raphaelite ladies of earlier days have given way to maidens who can shoot with the bow, swim, ride, and generally do most things, including making love, a good deal more capably than their young men.’ In The Pilgrims of Hope the speaker, his wife, and his friend set out to join the Communards in besieged Paris, ‘we three together, and there to die like men.’ News from Nowhere depicts a land of effortless female superiority, and Ellen is the spirit of the earth itself and all that grows from it. On the other hand, in A Dream of John Ball, Will Green’s