As we never associated William Morris with fine weather, rather taking him to be a pilot poet lent by the Vikings to steer us from the Doldrums in which we now lie all becalmed in smoke to some Valhalla of his own creation beyond the world's end, it seemed appropriate that on his burial-day the rain descended and the wind blew half a gale from the north-west.
Amongst the many mysteries of enigmatic England, few have more puzzled me than our attitude toward our rare great men. No one can say that in our streets they jostle other passengers, pushing the average man into the gutter, which is his own estate. Neither in church or State, or in religion, the Press, the army, amongst the licensed victuallers, or at the Bar do they abound so much as to take all the profits of the various jobs I have referred to from their weaker brethren. It may be that we think them "blacklegs," working, so to speak, for too long hours at too high pressure; it may be that the democratic sentiment, of which we hear so much and see so little, thinks them, as Gracchus Babeuf did, nothing but "aristos" sent by an unjust God (Himself a ci-devant) to trample on us.
Genius in England is a thing accursed, and that it is unpleasing even to the Creator of all Englishmen is manifest by the marked disapproval shown to it by the majority of the created. Therefore, I take it in the future, as the note has, so to speak, been taken by the show of success, that we shall not be called upon to stand much more of it.
So the rain descended, and the northwest wind battled and strove amongst the trees and chimney-tops, sending the leaves and hats into the mud, making one think upon the fisherfolk, the men aboard the ocean tramps, the shepherds in the glens of Inverness-shire, upon the ranchmen out on the open prairie riding round the cattle, and on the outcasts of the El Dorado, crouching the livelong night under some Christian bridge or philanthropic railway arches.
I have a standing quarrel with "le grand capricieux" called Providence, but at a funeral it generally appears he does his best so to dispose the weather that the principal shall not regret the climate he is leaving. Seen through the gloom at Paddington, within the station, moving about like fish in an aquarium, were gathered those whom England had sent forth to pay respects to the moat striking figure of our times.
Artists and authors, archaeologists, with men of letters, Academicians, the pulpit, stage, the Press, the statesmen, craftsmen, and artificers, whether of books or of pictures, or idlers, all otherwise engaged.
Philanthropists agog about Armenia, Cuba, and Crete, spouting of Turks and infidels and foreign cruelties, whilst he who strove for years for Englishmen lay in a railway waggon.
The guilds were absent, with the trades unions and the craftsmen, the hammermen, the weavers, the matchmakers, and those for whom he worked and thought.
Upon the platform stood Kropotkin and John Burns, Richards and Williams (of Tower Hill), with Walter Crane, Burne-Jones, and a few Russian Nihilists and Polish Jews.
Not that he was forgotten of those with whom he lived; for in a little group, forlorn, dishevelled, and their eyes grown dim with striving for the coming of the revolution, stood his own faithful carles from Hammersmith, and they, too, followed their master to the end—standing upon the platform, as it were upon the brink of some new country, over which they saw but knew they could not enter.
When a great man dies in other countries, all his last wishes are disregarded, even his family shrinks into second rank, and he becomes the property of those who in his life flung mud at or neglected him. Outbursts of cant, oceans of snivel, are let loose upon his memory, so that it may be that in this instance our Saxon stodginess preserved us from some folly and bad taste. Yet I would have liked to see a crowd of people in the streets, at least a crowd of workmen, if but to mark the absence of the dead man's fellows. Thus moralising, the train slipped from the platform as a sledge slips through the snow, and in the carriage I found myself seated between some "comrades."
Had they been cultured folk, it is ten to one the talk had run upon the colour of the dead man's shirt, his boots, his squashy hat, and other things as worthy of attention.
Bourgeois et gens de peu, seated upon the hard, straight seats provided by the thoughtful company to mark the difference betwixt the passengers it lives off and those it cringes to, we moralised, each in our fashion, upon the man. Kindly but choleric, the verdict was, apt to break into fury, easily appeased, large-hearted, open-handed, and the "sort of bloke you always could depend on," so said the "comrades," and it seemed to me their verdict was the one I should have liked upon myself.
So we reached Oxford, and found upon the platform no representatives of that old trades union there to greet us, and no undergraduates to throng the station, standing silently to watch the poet's funeral. True, it was long vacation; but had the body of some Buluwayo burglar happened to pass, they had all been there. The ancient seat of pedantry, where they manufacture prigs as fast as butchers in Chicago "hurdle hogs," was all unmoved.
Sleeping the, sleep of the self-satisfied were dons and masters, and the crew of those who, if they chance once in a century to have a man of genius amongst them, are all ashamed of him.
Sleeping, but stertorous, the city lay girt in its throng of jerry buildings, quite out of touch with all mankind, keeping its sympathy for piffling commentators on Menander, a bottler-up of learning for the rich with foolish regulations, a Laodicea which men like Morris long ago cast from their minds and mouth.
So the storm went with us to Witney, which seems as little altered as when the saying was "A badger and a Witney man you can tell them by their coat." Arrived at Lechlade, for the first time it appeared the ceremony was fitted for the man.
No red-faced men in shabby black to stagger with the coffin to the hearse, but in their place four countrymen in moleskin bore the body to an open hay-cart, all festooned with vines, with alder, and with bulrushes, and driven by a man who looked coeval with the Saxon Chronicle. And still the north-west wind bent trees and bushes, turning the leaves of the bird maples back upon their footstalks, making them look like poplars, and the rain beat on the straggling hedges, the lurid fruit such as only grow in rural England—the fruit of privet, with ripe hipps and haws; the foliage of the Guelder roses hung on the bushes ; along the road a line of slabs of stone extended, reminding one of Portugal ; ragweed and loosetrife, with rank hemp agrimony, were standing dry and dead, like reeds beside a lake, and in the rain and wind the yokels stood at the crossroads or at the openings of the bridlepaths. Somehow they seemed to feel that one was gone who thought of them and our driver said: "We've lost a dear good friend in Master Morris; I've driven him myself 'undreds of miles." No funeral carriages, but country flies, driven by red-faced men in moleskins, carried the mourners, and in a pony cart a farmer, with a face as red as are the bottles in a chemist's window, brought up the rear, driving his shaggy pony with the air of one who drives a chariot.
Through Lechlade, with its Tudor church, its gabled houses roofed with Winsford slates all overgrown with houseleek, and with lichens, and with the stalks of wallflower and valerian projecting from the chinks, we took our way.
There, unlike Oxford, the whole town was out, and from the diamond-paned and bevelled windows gazed children in their print dresses and sunbonnets which Morris must have loved. Then Farmer Hobbs' man drew up before the little church which is now rendered famous by the description of the most illustrious man who sleeps so close to it. The row of limes, flagged walks, the ample transept and square porch, the row of sun-dials down the wall, most with their gnomons lost, is known to all the world.
Time has dealt leniently with it, and the Puritans have stayed their fury at the little cross upon the tower.
Inside the church was decorated for a harvest festival, the lamps all wreathed with ears of oats and barley, whilst round the font and in the porch lay pumpkins, carrots, and sheaves of corn- a harvest festival such as he himself perhaps had planned, not thinking he himself would be the chiefest first-fruit.
Standing amongst the wet grass of the graves, artists and Socialists, with friends, relations, and the casual spectators, a group of yokels faced us, gaping at nothing, after the fashion of themselves and of their animals. And then I fancied for a moment that the strong oak coffin, with its wrought-iron handles and pall of Anatolia velvet, was opened, and I saw the waxen face and features of the dead man circled by his beard, and in his shroud his hands upon his breast, looking like some old Viking in his sleep, beside the body of his favourite horse, at the opening of some mound beside the sea in Scandinavia.
So dust to dust fell idly on my ears, and in its stead a vision of the England which he dreamed of filled my mind. The little church grew brighter, looking as it were filled with the spirit of a fuller faith embodied in an ampler ritual.
John Ball stood by the grave, with him a band of archers all in Lincoln green, birds twittered in the trees, and in the air the scent of apple-blossom and white hawthorn hung. All was much fairer than I had ever seen the country look, fair with a fairness that was never seen in England but by the poet, and yet a fairness with which he laboured to endue it. Once more the mist descended, and my sight grew dimmer; the England of the Fellowship was gone, John Ball had vanished, and with him the archers, and in their place remained the knot of countrymen, plough-galled and bent with toil; the little church turned greyer, as if a reformation had passed over it. I looked again, the bluff, bold, kindly face had faded into the northwest wind.
The following corrections appeared in the Saturday Review on the 17th of October:
To the Editor of the Saturday Review.
39 Chester Square, 12 October, 1896.
Sir, — As a general rule, I find that a few misprints give an originality to writing which the author could never have imparted to it. I confess freely that the imaginative powers of the average “comp.” (of course, when working not more than eight hours a day and at Trade-Union prices) is far superior to my own. On this particular occasion, the subject of my article having been William Morris, I am loth that any one should imagine the misprints in it were the effects of my own carelessness. I lay it all upon my handwriting, which is infamous.
I must explain. I did not state that. “Richards and Burne-Jones ” were present on the platform at Paddington, and I apologize first to the Academy and Mr. Richmond, and, secondly, to the not impossibly existent “Comrade” Richards. Again, I did not state “artificers of idlers” were absent, but “artificers of ideas.” I scarcely think that there are many “artificers of idlers” to be found, for who would trouble to produce at second hand that with which nature has provided us at first hand in such abundance?
Though not a purist, I did not write “Anatolia” for “Anatolian,” but never mind, no doubt in time democracy may yet break down the artificial class distinctions between adjectives and nouns invented by grammarians. For the above mistakes, and others which I need not dwell upon, I apologize to you and to your readers, and lay the blame upon my writing.
I am, yours faithfully,
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM..
With the North-West Wind
R. B. Cunninghame-Graham
Saturday Review, 10th October 1896, pp.388-390
Labour Leader, 17th October 1896 (source of this transcription)
Graham Seaman, September 2020.