On this day (4 June) in 1877 The Times published a letter from Morris on the proposed restoration of Canterbury Cathedral

Anna Matyukhina

The William Morris Appreciation Society

2017年6月4日

  · 

On this day (4 June) in 1877 The Times published a letter from Morris on the proposed restoration of Canterbury Cathedral https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1877/cant1.htm Then on June 7, 1877 the Times published another letter from Morris on the restoration of Canterbury Cathedral. https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1877/cant2.htm

These letters were written by Morris in reply to The Dean of Canterbury who wrote to the Times on 24 May 1877 about the proposed restorations to Canterbury Cathedral: `Mr. Morris's Society probably looks on our Cathedral as a place for antiquarian research or for budding architects to learn their arts in. We need it for the daily worship of God.'

Canterbury Cathedral I

By William Morris

As Mr Loftie's letter, quoted in your columns, calls on our Society by name, and as the letters of the Dean of Canterbury and Mr Beresford Hope touch our principles closely, I venture to hope that you will give me space for a word or two on the subject of the restoration of the choir of Canterbury Cathedral. As to the present woodwork at the west end, it seems superfluous to praise it, as it is agreed on all hands that it is good, though in some people's minds I suppose it would be condemned as inherently unholy, because it is a post-Reformation work. But, good as it is, I cannot conceive what purpose it can serve when it is taken away from the place it was made for, and in which it looks both dignified and serious, as well as elegant; furthermore, what is to be the fateof the present stone screen when Sir Gilbert Scott's conjectural restoration of Prior Eastry's work is carried out? It is true that its surface has been destroyed by restoration, but it has been at least a fine work of a good date.

It may seem a little matter to make a stir about a piece of clever joinery and carving of Charles II's time, when the great work of the twelfth century Frenchman is about it and above it, but I must confess to sharing that fear which Mr Beresford Hope thinks has made reason unhelpful to Mr Loftie; for I suppose that the proposed imitation, restoration or forgery of Prior Eastry's rather commonplace tracery is only the beginning of the evil day at Canterbury, and that before long we shall see the noble building of the two Williams confused and falsified by the usual mass of ecclesiastical trumpery and coarse daubing that all true lovers of art and history dread so sorely; that, in short, the choir of Canterbury will go the way of Ely, St Cross, and Salisbury.

Sir, I think that our ancient historical monuments are national property and ought no longer to be left to the mercy of the many and variable ideas of ecclesiastical propriety that may at any time be prevalent among us.

Letter to the Times, 4 June 1877.

Dictionary[edit]

• Aisle: 《建築》（教会堂の）側廊；礼拝堂の中央通路  A pair of walkways that are parallel to the primary public spaces in the church, e.g. nave, choir and transept. The aisles are separated from the public areas by pillars supporting the upper walls, called an arcade.^[3]
• Ambulatory: [名]《建築》（教会の）周歩廊；（修道院の）歩廊 A specific name for the curved aisle around the choir^[2]
• Apse:教堂屋頂：教堂後部（走廊頂端）半圓形之頂。西洋建築で、聖堂などの建物・部屋から突出した半円形の内部空間。後陣。The end of the building opposite the main entry. Often circular, but it can be angular or flat. In medieval traditions, it was the east end of the building.^[3]
• Buttress:《建築》バットレス，控え壁（◇建物の補強のために屋外から壁面に向けて設置される小さな壁） Large stone pier holding the roof vaults in place.^[3] A buttress may be visible as in the Gothic flying buttress, or it may be hidden in the complex of aisles and galleries.^[2]
• Cathedral: 主教座堂：教區中的首要聖堂，堂內置有主教的（寶座）座位； cathedra 拉丁文意即座位，故稱主教座堂。The home church of a Bishop, which contains the cathedra or bishop's chair.^[2] The church may be of any size.^[3]
• Choir/Quire:  (1) 聖詠團；唱經班；唱詩班；歌侶；歌席。 (2) 唱經樓：教堂中之唱經樓、合唱團。The part of the church usually beyond the transept and in line with the axis of the nave. The area may be higher than the level of the nave.^[3] The name choir is used because traditionally the clergy of the Cathedral stood here as a chorus, chanting or singing during the responsive portion of Divine Offices or Mass.^[4]  
  The 12th-century quire (Canterbury Cathedral)

Crossing  十字形の教会で本堂と袖廊そでろうとが交差する所

• Quire: An alternative spelling of Choir.
• Crypt:  (1) 地下聖堂。 (2) 墓室。Usually the below ground foundation. Used for burial or as a chapel.^[3]
• Facade立面: The outside of the church, where the main doors are located. In traditional medieval design, this faced the west and is called the West End.^[2]
• Narthex: [名]《建築》拝廊（◇教会の正面入り口から本堂までの広間になっている廊下）The entrance or lobby area, located at the west end of the nave.
• Nave: 中央走道：教堂中間自入口處到祭台前的走道，是進出聖堂必經之路。The primary area of public observance of the Mass.^[3] It is immediately inside the front doors.
• Chapel：小聖堂；小教堂；小禮拜堂；分堂： (1) 指學校、軍營、醫院等附設的教堂。 (2) 指大教堂內區隔的小教堂。
• Radiating Chapels: Located around the Apse of the church, accessible from the Ambulatory.^[2]  〈道路・線などが〉放射状に広がる，（中心から）八方に伸びる（out）≪from≫；他〈物が〉〈棒状の物を〉放射状に広げる
• Sanctuary:  (1) 聖所：教堂中祭台附近的空間。 (2) 朝聖地；聖地：是教區主教（教長）批准的教堂或聖所，以便信徒前去祈禱、朝聖（法典 1230 ）；又稱 shrine 。An elevated platform that contains the main altar and associated liturgical elements that is restricted for ceremonial use by the clergy, often fenced from adjoining spaces. It is centered on the main east–west axis within the east end and generally located within the choir or the apse.
• Transept:[名]《建築》（十字形教会堂の）翼廊 Sometimes called the ‘Crossing’, the transept forms wings at right angles to the nave.^[2] In early Romanesque churches, it was often at the east end, creating a Tau Cross. Later designs placed the transept about two-thirds of the way from the West End to the East End. This created the Latin cross plan. It usually separates the nave from the choir.^[3]

《使日十年 TEN YEARS IN JAPAN, POSTSCRIPT TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 》兩首引詩 My Native Land By Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)；Sacrifice By Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1803–1882

《使日十年  TEN YEARS IN JAPAN, POSTSCRIPT TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 》兩首引詩(不滿意中譯，找空討論，待補 )  My Native Land  By Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)；Sacrifice By Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1803–1882


The lines in its 6th Canto that begin "Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, / This is my own, my native land!" are cited in Edward Everett Hale's story "The Man Without a Country" (1863).


《使日十年》
TEN YEARS IN JAPAN A Contemporary Record drawn from the Diaries and Private and Official Papers of JOSEPH C. GREW UNITED STA TES AMBASSADOR TO JAPAN 1932-1942 https://archive.org/stream/TenYearsInJapan/TenYearsInJapan_djvu.txt



的歸國之後的哥倫比亞電台廣播稿也引用，中譯者不知原詩，所以翻譯不知所云：

POSTSCRIPT TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 

Radio Address delivered over the CBS network, August 30,1942 

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

And then came one of the greatest of all moments. I awoke at 
1.00 a.m., on June 25, sensing that something was happening. I 
looked out of die port-hole and saw a piece of wood slowly moving^ 
past in the water. Another piece of wood moved faster. We were 
at last under way, slowly accelerating until the ship was finally 
speeding at full steam, away from Yokohama, away from Japan, 
pointing homewards. Ah, what a moment that was, even though we 
had 18,000 miles" to cover and seventy days in all before we should 
pass the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour and repeat to our¬ 
selves, with tears pouring down many a face, 

*****

My Native Land

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,

As home his footsteps he hath turn'd

From wandering on a foreign strand!

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;

For him no Minstrel raptures swell;

High though his titles, proud his name,

Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;

Despite those titles, power, and pelf,

The wretch, concentred all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,

Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

---

The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) is a long narrative poem by Walter Scott. 

***

We are fighting this war for the preservation of righteousness, law, 
and order, but above all for the preservation of the freedoms which 
have been conferred upon us by the glorious heritage of our American 
citizenship, and for these same freedoms in other countries of the 
United Nations, and while we are fighting against the forces of evil, 
lawlessness, and disorder in the world, we are primarily fighting 
to prevent the enslavement which actually threatens to be imposed 
upon us if we fail. I am convinced that this is not an overstatement. 
Surely ours is a cause worth sacrificing for and living for and dying 
for, if necessary. ^ 

Though love repine and reason chafe, 

There came a voice without reply: 

5 Tis man's perdition to be safe 
When for the truth he ought to die ! 

Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1803–1882

47. Sacrifice

THOUGH love repine, and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply,—
"'T is man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die."

google翻譯也錯：

拉爾夫·沃爾多·愛默生。 1803-1882年

47.犧牲

透徹的愛護人，理智的煩惱，
傳來一個沒有回音的聲音，
“不是人類的安全保障，
當他為真理而死時。”

Tangles of vision, style and stance By Harold Bloom

Times Literary Suppleme

n
t

1 小時 ·



From the Archive: Harold Bloom considers the American poetic tradition


THE-TLS.CO.UK

Tangles of vision, style and stance
In an article published in the TLS in 1980, Harold Bloom, who died in October 2019, considers the American poetic tradition



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Literary criticism

Tangles of vision, style and stance

In an article published in the TLS in 1980, Harold Bloom, who died in October 2019, considers the American poetic tradition

By Harold Bloom

Wallace Stevens, in a letter written half-a-year before his death, re­marked that Walt Whitman’s “good things, the superbly beautiful and moving things, are those that he wrote naturally, with an extempo­raneous and irrepressible vehe­mence of emotion”. True and reve­latory of Stevens’s best work, rather than of Whitman’s, the remark illustrates a central vehemence of American poetic tradition. The best poets of that climate are hermetic precisely when they profess to be vatic democrats, and they are curi­ously extemporaneous when they attempt to be most elitist. Whitman and Stevens, despite Stevens’s pro­test, deeply resemble one another in this regard, and have large affini­ties with a company of major American poets that includes Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, and such extraordinary contemporary figures as John Ashbery, James Merrill and A. R. Ammons. A deep uncertainty concerning the American reader combines with ambitious designs upon that reader, and the result is a poetic stance more self-contradic­tory than that of most modern British poets of comparable achieve­ment, from Thomas Hardy on to Geoffrey Hill, with D. H. Lawrence being the largest exception, as his Whitmanesque affinities clearly show.

Ralph Waldo Emerson may be regarded either as the primary source or as the initial representative of this American poetic difference. His audacity is still too little appreciated in Great Britain, where many critics oddly think him somewhat tame and bland. His dialectics are subtle, but his actual stance is antinomian and even violent in relation to the pieties of all anterior creeds. A religious thinker who could say, of the crucifixion that it was a Great Defeat whereas we, as Americans, demand Victory, a success to the senses as well as to the soul, is a writer who like his admirer Nietzsche, would dare to say anything. Urging his American bards to be at once agnostic and democratic, the prophetic Emerson encouraged, and goes on fostering, a split in American high culture that will evidently never end. The alternative convention in American literary aesthetics, which began with the anti-Emersonian protests of Hawthorne, Melville and Poe, and continued through the school of T. S. Eliot, finds its honourable last representative today in the distinguished poetry that Robert Penn Warren has been writing for the last decade. But Warren is a sun­set hawk at the end of a counter-tradition. Emersonianism, with all its tangles of vision, style and stance, remains the dominant American poetic mode.

Three instances – from Whitman, Stevens, and Ashbery – may be cited in illustration of the peculiarities of American poetic Stance. Stevens kept insisting that he did not read Whitman, but when in a Yale lec­ture of 1947 he wished to give a demonstration of what he could admire as poetic strength, he chose to quote a brief lyric that Whitman wrote very late, “A Clear Mid­night”:

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done.
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

The stance here is the Emersonian Dionysiac, returning to the commonal, away even from the differences and iterations of language. But the great and only apparent improvisor, Whitman, “an American Bard at last”, is totally individualized in what is after all his unitary and esoteric theme, the oceanic mother who compounds in herself, as she will for Stevens and for Hart Crane, “Night, sleep, death, and the stars”. The American poetic soul emerges as the Coleridgean moon of imagination, “silent, gazing, pondering but with the destructive American Emersonian difference, an antithetical flight or regression away from art and nature alike, to­wards the solipsistic grandeur that is a new gnosis.

Whitman’s greatness may be in the ease or grace of this hermetic flight or regression, whereas Stevens had to attain it through rather too overt an esotericism or gaudy elitism, as here in the fable of the Arab-as-moon from Notes toward a Supreme Fiction:

We say: at night an Arabian in my room,
With his damned hoobla-hoobla, hoobla-how,
Inscribes a primitive astronomy
Across the unscrawled fores the future casts
And throws his stars around the floor. By day
The wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-how.
And still the grossest iridescence of ocean
Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls
Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

Life’s nonsense reduces us to relying upon the distinction be­tween hoobla-how and hoobla-hoo, which is an instance of that Stevensian negative exuberance which has driven the eminent American critic (of the Poundian persuasion) Hugh Kenner to the sad conclusion that all Stevens represents is the ulti­mate culmination of the poetics of Edward Lear. Yet the distinction belongs firmly to Emersonian doc­trine: the hoobla-hoo is the song of the bird of Aphrodite, the wood-dove, but the hoobla-how reductively refers to sexual limitation, due to age and a lifetime’s repres­siveness.

As the Coleridgean moon shines upon the aged Stevens, it compels him to confront what Whitman was too evasive to confront: the self-awareness of the erotic limits of poetic imagination. The future is death and death only, the word out of the sea uttered so persuasively by the Whitmanian terrible mother, yet Stevens masks his sexual anxie­ties by an elitist extravagance of trope. The moony Arab can afford to throw “his stars around the floor ” but Stevens has lost so much that he can afford no more dis­carding gestures. Perhaps Stevens was addicted to loss; it might be urged that his disciple Ashbery scarcely knows how to proceed except by acknowledging loss. That may be the inevitable price of a tradition whose founders – Emerson and Whitman – so perpetually demanded victory.

It is the iridescent ocean, final and maternal form of “night, sleep, death and the stars which is the largest figuration of Stevens’s poe­tic (and sexual) dilemma. His eso­teric diction barely disguises the human despair of a self-described “harmonious skeptic”. Whitman could identify himself with the pon­dering moon, and more often with the sun, once even asserting, like Freud’s mad Dr Schreber, that he could send forth sunrise from himself.

The deliberate vagueness of the Stevensian moonlight produces the “unscrawled fores”, or poems-not-to-be-written, but if these suggest poetic impotence, they testify also to a power of redundancy, to an imagination that can afford to throw its stars around the floor. By day one used to hear the wood-dove, but now one hears always the ocean mocking us with its erotic light. Pierced by the strange story of our inadequate relation to life, we end in its nonsense, which is that desire goes on even as the erotic fails. The poet could be speaking these realizations to a universal reader, but he has chosen an elite, capable of relating to so esoteric a mode. Stevens said once that the poet must direct himself not to a drab, but to a woman with the hair of a pythoness, which is a wonderful sentiment, but doubtless he implied also that such a muse would partake of Medusa.

Of the many contemporary heirs of Whitman and of Stevens, John Ashbery seems likeliest to achieve something near to their eminence. Yet their uncertainty as to their audience is far surpassed in the shifting stances that Ashbery assumes. His mode can vary from the apparently opaque, so disjunctive as to seem beyond interpreta­tion, to a kind of limpid clairvoy­ance that again brings the Emerson­ian contraries together. Contemplat­ing Parmigianino’s picture, in his major long poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ashbery achieves a vision in which art, rather than nature, becomes the imprisoner of the soul:

The soul has to stay where it is,
Even though restless, hearing rain-drops at the pane,
The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay
Posing in this place. It must move as little as possible
This is what the portrait says
But there is in that gaze a combination
Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
In its restraint that one cannot look for long
The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.

Whitman’s Soul, knowing its true hour in wordlessness, is apparently reduced here and now to a moment only of attention. And yet even this tearful realization, supposedly abandoning the soul to a convex mirror, remains a privileged moment, of an Emersonian rather than Paterian kind. Precisely where he seems most wistful and knowingly bewildered by loss, Ash­bery remains most dialectical, like his American ancestors.

The simple diction and vulner­able stance barely conceal the presence of the American Transcendental Self, an ontological self that increases even as the empirical self abandons every spiritual assertion. Hence the “amusement” that takes up its stance between “tenderness” and “regret”, Whitmanian affec­tions, and hence also the larger hint of a power held in reserve, “so powerful in its restraint that one cannot look for long”. An Ameri­can Orphic, wandering in the Emersonian legacy, can afford to sur­render the soul in much the same temper as the ancient Gnostics did. The soul can be given up to the Demiurge, whether of art or nature, because a spark or pneuma is more vital than the psyche, and fits no hollow whatsoever. Where Whitman and Stevens are at once hermetic and off-hand, so is Ashbery, but his throwaway gestures pay the price of an ever-increasing Ameri­can sense of belatedness.

Emerson’s New England law of compensation, that “nothing is got for nothing”, is my bridge from the dilemmas of American poetic tradition to the impasses of a native American kind of literary criticism. From Emerson himself through to Kenneth Burke, the American tradition of criticism is highly dialectical, differing in this from the British empirical tradition that has prevailed from Dr Johnson to Empson. But this American criticism precisely resembles Whitmanian poetry, rather than the Continental dialectics that have surged from Hegel through Heideg­ger on to the contemporary Deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Hegelian Negation, even in its latest critical varieties, is intellectually optimistic because it is always based upon a destructive concept of the given. Given facts (and given texts) may appear to common sense as a positive index of truth, but are taken as being in reality the negation of truth, which must destroy apparent facts, and must deconstruct texts. British or Humean literary critics maintain the ultimate authority of the fact or text. Emerson, and Kenneth Burke after him, espouse the Negative, but not at all in an Hegelian mode. Emerson, both more cheerful and less optimistic than Hegel, insisted that a fact was an epiphany of God, but this insistence identified God with Emerson in his most expansive and transcending moments. Burke remarks that everything we might say about God has its precise analogue in things that we can say about a language, a remark which defines American poetry as the new possibility of a negative that per­petually might restore a Transcen­dental Self.

The American critic here and now, in my judgment, needs to keep faith both with American poetry and the American negative, which means one must not yield either to the school of Deconstruction or to the perpetual British school of Com­mon Sense. Our best poets, from Whitman through Stevens to Ash­bery, make impossible and self-con­tradictory demands upon both their readers and themselves. I myself urge an antithetical criticism in the American grain, affirming the self over language, while granting a priority to figurative language over meaning. The result is a mixed discourse, vatic perhaps, and at once esoteric and democratic, but that is the burden of American tradition. Stevens says it best for that bur­den but also for a possible freedom in the final stanza of “The Poems of Our Climate”:

There would still remain the never-resting mind.
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed
The imperfect is our paradise
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Printed at the Kelmscott

Printed at the Kelmscott

William Morris and the Kelmscott Press 2017-08-03 【漢清講堂】

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W8xjOI5-Fg&t=21s


Printed at the Kelmscott





The Kelmscott Press published fifty-two books and a set of specimen pages for Froissart's Chronicles, a book that was never completed.

William Morris had many ideas for volumes he hoped to print at the Kelmscott Press. Books already in production were completed after Morris's death in 1896; however the press was closed in 1898 after these works were completed. There were many works that Morris had hoped to print but never produced. These included Shakespeare's plays, a catalogue of William Morris's library, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, and novels by Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. A complete timeline of Morris' setting up and running of the press is available on the resources page.

To learn more about the works and translations authored by William Morris see Morris as Translator and Morris as Author.

Click images to view enlarged versions
Medieval Literature




Laudes Beatae Mariae Virginis

Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896

View digitized book




The History of Godefrey of Boloyne and of the Conquest of Iherusalem

by William of Tyre
Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1893

View digitized book
Classics of English Literature




Maud: a Monodrama

by Lord Alfred Tennyson
Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1893

View digitized book




Poems Chosen Out of the Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896

View digitized book




The Poems of John Keats

by John Keats
Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1894

Works of Colleagues and Contemporaries


The Love-Lyrics and Songs of Proteus

by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1892

View digitized book




Hand and Soul

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1895

View digitized book

About

Every year, Special Collections & University Archives staff work together to create relevant and interesting exhibits on topics that are of interest to the University, the community, and to scholars.

This exhibit examines the life and vision of inspirational firebrand William Morris. It focuses on his written works, political activism and artistic endeavors. Morris was a man of incredible depth and breadth of talent. His creativity and industry are aspirational for today's citizens. "How We Might Live: The Vision of William Morris" seeks to instruct viewers on the rich life of William Morris and to showcase the University of Maryland Libraries' William Morris Collection.

Exhibition Team

Ann Hudak, Doug McElrath, Amber Kohl, Laura French, and Melissa Lindberg

With help from: Jennifer Paul, Explus Incorporated and Bryan Draper

Special thanks to: Rebecca Wilson, Krista Anderson, Kristin Bobowiec, Michael Davidson, Adrianna Marroquin, Francy Stilwell, and Charlotte Sturm

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For general information about the library and our collections, contact us
For questions about the exhibit, please email Doug McElrath or call 301-405-9210.

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Printed at the Kelmscott Press | William Morris

The Kelmscott Press published fifty-two books and a set of specimen pages for Froissart's Chronicles, a book that was never completed.

GOSSIP ABOUT AN OLD HOUSE ON THE UPPER THAMES BY WILLIAM MORRIS. .

The William Morris Society

VIMEO.COM

William Morris at Kelmscott Manor
The words and poetry in this photo film illustrate the affection that Morris

The words and poetry in this photo film illustrate the affection that Morris had for his country home in the Cotswolds of England, as explained by the man himself: “A house that I love with a reasonable love I think: for though my words may give you no idea of any special charm about it, yet I assure you that the charm is there; so much has the old house grown up out of the soil and the lives of those that lived on it: some thin thread of tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of meadow and acre and wood and river; a certain amount (not too much let us hope) of common sense, a liking for making material serve one’s turn, and perhaps at bottom some little grain of sentiment: this I think was what went to the making of the old house.”


Photos and "readings" by Scott Antony

*****參考，非台詞

http://www.tfo.upm.es/docencia/ArtDeco/GossipMorris.htm 

GOSSIP ABOUT AN OLD HOUSE ON THE UPPER THAMES.


BY WILLIAM MORRIS.


Published in THE QUEST: Number IV. November, 1895.


Originally printed at the press of
the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, and published by
Messrs. Cornish Brothers, New Street, Birmingham, England.






HE Village of Kelmscott lies close to the Thames on the Oxfordshire side of it, some five miles (by water) from the present end of the navigation at Inglesham, where the Colne, coming down from Fairford, Bibury and Chedworth, joins the main stream of the Thames.





Kelmscott lies on the plain of the Thames Valley, but the ground rises up from it gradually, with little interruption of the rise, till the crest of the ridge is gained which lies between Oxfordshire and Worcestershire, culminating in the Broadway Beacon some thirty miles from Kelmscott. To the N.E. of the village lies the nearly treeless piece of ground formerly Grafton Common, and beyond it is a string of pretty inland villages, or rather two strings, the westward comprising little Faringdon, Broughton Poggs and Filkins; the eastward, Langford, Broadwell, and Kencott. Of these Langford with its church partly 13th century, partly preconquest, Broadwell with its lovely 13th century tower and spire, and the curious little church of Broughton Poggs are specially interesting.


Turning south from Kelmscott one comes on the Thames, with the weir of Eaton Hastings on the foot-path from the village, but on the Berkshire side a range of heights low, but well designed, rise up from the flat meadows here, and running eastward well into a higher range on which Faringdon lies. Three miles down the river is a very pretty 15th century bridge of three arches which carries the road from Bampton to Faringdon over the Thames at Radcot. On the Eyott and the fields about here was fought a battle between the Earl of Oxford, Richard II supporter, and Bolingbroke, as the latter marched toward his thrown; and Cromwell also fought a skirmish there on his advance to the attack of Faringdon House, which was one of the stubbornest of the scattered Royalist strongholds.


To get back to Kelmscott again. The church, at the N.W. end of the village, is small but interesting; the mass of it, a nave with a tiny aisle transept and chancel, being Early English of date, though the arches of the aisle are round-headed; a feature which is imitated from Faringdon Church, and repeated at Little Faringdon, and Langford. There are remains of painting all over the church, the N. transept having been painted with figure subjects of the life of Christ in trefoil head panels. The E. window has a painted glass image of St. George (in whose honour the church is dedicated) of the time of Edward IVth. Most of the windows (which are insertions of the early 14th century) have their inner arches elegantly cusped, a characteristic feature of these Oxfordshire churches. A very beautiful pell-cot formed by two trefoil arches crowns the eastern gable of the nave, and composes pleasantly with the low pitched roofs over a clerestory, which in the 15th century took the place of the once high-pitched ones. The church is plastered almost all over the walls, as no doubt it was in the earliest days: it is fortunate in having escaped the process of stripping and pointing which so many of our village churches have undergone at the hands of the restoring wise-acres.


HEN you turn down from the church toward the Thames you come at a corner of the road on the base of the village cross probably of the 15th century), and then, turning to the left and bearing round to the right, all of which transaction takes place in about two hundred yards, you come face to face with a mass of grey walls and pearly grey roofs which makes the House, called by courtesy the Manor House, though it seems to have no manorial rights attached to it, which is the ultimate subject of this paper, and which I have held for twenty-three years. It lies at the very end of the village on a road which, brought up shortly by a back-water of the Thames, becomes a mere cart track leading into the meadows along the river.


You enter through a door in a high impointed stone wall, having passed by first a pretty, characteristic cottage with its baking oven much en evidence, and next a shed with high-pitched-roof. Entering the door in the wall you go up a flagged path through the front garden to the porch, which is a modern but harmless addition in wood. The house from this side is a lowish three storied one with mullioned windows, (in the 3rd these are in the gables) and at right angles to this another block whose bigger lower windows and pedimented gable lights indicate a later date. The house is built of well-laid rubble stone of the district, the wall of the latter part being buttered over, so to say, with thin plaster which has now weathered to the same colour as the stone of the walls; the roofs are covered with the beautiful stone slates of the district, the most lovely covering which a roof can have, especially when, as here and in all the traditional old houses of the countryside, they are `sized down'; the smaller ones to the top and the bigger toward the eaves, which gives one of the same sort of pleasure in their orderly beauty as a fishers' scales or a birds' feathers.


Turning round the house by the bigger block, one sees where the gable of the older and simpler part of the house once came out, and notes with pleasure the simple expression of the difference of levels in the 1st floor and 3rd floor, as by the diversity of windows and roofs: the back of the house shows nothing but the work of the earlier builders, and is in plan of the shape of an E with the tongue cut out, [ of the older part of the house, is copied in the later addition, and the two with their elegantly shaped gables, handsomely moulded, add much to the general beauty of the house.


Standing a little aloof from the N.E. angle of the building one can get the best idea of a fact which it is essential to note, and which is found in all these old homes here-abouts, to wit, all the walls `batter,' i.e. lean a little back. this is so invariable that it is hardly possible to suppose that it is an example of traditional design from which the builders could not escape. To my mind it is a beauty, taking from the building a rigidity which would otherwise mar it; giving it (I can think of no other word) a flexibility which is never found in our modern imitations of the houses of this age.


From this square place also one gets a good view of the farm buildings which stand to the South of the house; a very handsome barn of quite beautiful proportions, and several other sheds, including a good dove cot, all built in the same way as the house, and grouping delightfully with it.






HE garden, divided by old clipped yew hedges, is quite unaffected and very pleasant, and looks in fact as if it were a part of the house, yet at least the clothes of it: which I think ought to be the aim of the layer out of a garden. Many a good house both old and new is marred by the vulgarity and stupidity of its garden, so that one is tormented by having to abstract in one's mind the good building from the nightmare of `horticulture' which surrounds it.


Going under an arched opening in the yew hedge which makes a little garth about a low door in the middle of the north wall, one comes into a curious passage or lobby, a part of which is screened into a kind of pantry by wooden mullions which have once been glazed, and offer somewhat of a problem to the architect. The said lobby leads into what was once a great parlour (the house is not great at all remember) and is now panelled with pleasing George Ist panelling painted white: the chimney piece is no doubt of the date of the building, and is of rude but rather amusing country work; the windows in this room are large and transomed, and it as pleasant as possible; and I have many a memory of hot summer mornings passed in its coolness amidst the green reflections of the garden. Turning back, and following a little passage leading from the lobby aforesaid to the earlier part of the house, one passes by a room in the long arm of the [ almost level with the garden, with a stone chimney-piece rude enough as to its carving but well designed: and then at the end of the little passage is a delightful little room quite low ceilinged, in the place where the house is `thin in the wind,' so that there is a window east and a window west, and the whole room has a good deal the look of a particularly pleasant cabin at sea, were it not for the elms and the rooks on the west, and the green garden shrugs and the blackbirds on the east. This room is really the heart of the Kelmscott house, having been the parlor of the old house before `Mr. Thomas Turner built the house in the closes and on the tofts where once stood two ancient houses,' as an old deed has it; one of the `ancient houses,' as I am clear, being the old part of the present house, and Mr. Thomas Turner only built the grander and high block or wing.





Outside this little parlour is the entrance passage from the flagged path aforesaid, made by two stout studded partitions the carpentry of which is very agreable to anyone who does not want cabinet work to supplant carpentry. The very pleasant kitchen is on the further side of this entrance. Going back to the little passage which leads to the lobby one comes to the staircaise, of a common Elizabethan pattern with spherical knops on the standards, and so on to the first floor which has the peculiarity of being without passages, so that you have to go from one room into another, to the confusion of some of our casual visitors, to whom a bed in the close neighbourhood of a sitting room is a dire impropriety. Braving this terror, we must pass through the only north room in the house, which is in the junction of the older and the newer house and up three steps into the Tapestry, which is over the big panelled parlour. The walls of it are hung with tapestry of about 1600, representing the story of Samson; they were never great works of art, and now when all the bright colours are faded out, and nothing is left but the indigo blues, the greys and the warm yellowy browns, they look better, I think, than they were meant to look: at any rate they make the walls a very pleasant background for the living people who haunt the room; (it is our best sitting room now, though it was once the best bed-room) and, in spite of the designer, they give an air of romance to the room which nothing else would quite do.


NOTHER charm this room has, that through its south window you not only catch a glimpse of the Thames clover meadows and the pretty little elm-crowned hill over in Berkshire, but if you sit in the proper place, you can see not only the barn aforesaid with its beautiful sharp gable, the grey stone sheds, and the dove cot, but also the flank of the earlier house and its little gables and grey-scaled roofs, and this is a beautiful outlook indeed. Mr. New will, I am sure, give you a good idea of this - at least as much of it as the limits of his drawing will admit. The chimney-piece of this room is of stone, and of the date of the later work; again it is good after its rough country fashion; and in the middle of it, surrounded by a mantling by no means in-elegant, is the coat-armour of the Turners, argent, a cross ermine, four mill-rhinds sable. A mill-rhind by the way is that thing in which the spindle turns: hence the charge, which makes a piece of `canting heraldry,' as `tis called in French, armes parlantes.


Out of this best room let us pass through our present best bed room over the little parlour, and leaving a very pleasant room on the right, called the cheese-room when I first came to the house, and on the left a little room partitioned in modern times from a lobby, and which has the distinction of having its glazing almost wholly of old quarries - leaving all this we come to a newel stair-case, which comes up from the kitchen, and leads us up in the attics, i.e. the open roof under the slates, a very sturdy collar beam roof of elm often unsquared; it is most curiously divided under most of the smaller gables into little chambers where no doubt people, perhaps the hired field labourers, slept in old time: the bigger space is open, and is a fine place for children to play in, and has charming views east, west and north: but much of it is too curious for description. On one of the mullions of the older house is scored T W K 1577 Oct. 16. I believe this to be genuine, and not a relation to `Bill Stumps his mark.' K is like enough to be Kinch, a name still common hereabout. Again on a gable of the latter part is scored T B 1640 and representation in the manner of youth of either T.B., or his father, or schoolmaster; I am inclined to think the latter. T.B. I take to be one of the Bradshaws, several generations of whom are buried in Kelmscott church. These dates certainly square with probabilities, as the older part of the house looks about 1573, and the later (in this country side) looks 1630 to 1640. One thing I should have said before as to the position of the House: we are on the very confines of Oxfordshire; a slow brook or ditch saunters off to the Thames somewhat less than a furlong west from us, which is called the Town Ditch, or the County Ditch, and on the other side thereof is Gloucestershire.


ERE then are a few words about a house that I love; with a reasonable love I think: for though my words may give you no idea of any special charm about it, yet I assure you that the charm is there; so much has the old house grown up out of the soil and the lives of those that lived on it; needing no grand office-architect, with no great longing for anything else than correctness, and to be like Julius Caesar; but some thin thread of tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of the meadow and acre and wood and river; a certain amount (not too much let us hope) of common sense, a liking for making materials serve ones turn, and perhaps at bottom some little grain of sentiment. This I think was what went to the making of the old house; might we not manage to find some sympathy for all that from henceforward; or must we but shrink before the Philistine with one, Alas that it must perish!


William Morris.


Kelmscott, October 25, 1895.