Lady Lilith. This 1868 painting by Rossetti, in a frame of his design, appeared in the drawing room of his patron and friend, F. R. Leyland, surrounded by similar images of his creation. Rossetti's sonnet for this picture of Adam's dangerously seductive first wife was retitled "Body's Beauty" when it was incorporated into "The House of Life." (Courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum)

he experiment did not remain confined to the utopian spaces of Red House. Before the house-decorating was finished, it was reformulated as a commercial enterprise: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, providers of art-furnishings for homes and churches. With capital borrowed from his mother, Morris joined with Webb, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and their friends to create a cooperatively-owned business that was to survive and prosper well beyond the end of the century. Webb, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones contributed designs for stained glass, tiles, and occasional pieces of furniture, which Morris and Webb used in decorative schemes for commissioned projects. Morris also ran the workshops and served as general director. The contributing partners hoped that income from the Firm, supplementing that of the painters and the architect, would free them from commercial pressures to produce popular art while contributing beautiful objects to furnish everyday life. For the artists, then, craft would support art. Morris had a more radical vision: for him craft was the only socially responsible form of art. The Firm was his first effort to extend the pleasures of beautifully-decorated ordinary objects beyond the utopian social community of artists. But production to Morris's standards proved too expensive for all but wealthy buyers, nor could the Firm afford to offer the same kind of life to its hired workmen as Red House had briefly provided for the original partners. By the 1880s Morris concluded that the earthly paradise he envisioned through the union of craft and everyday life would only be possible after a socialist revolution. For more than a decade he threw enormous energies and money into the effort to educate and organize British socialism. The success of the Firm, now retailing its products in its own shops, enabled him to do so. In the 1860s and 70s, however, the Firm supported his experiments to improve materials and processes of manufacture, his study of the decorative arts of other cultures, and his prolific pattern-designing. He provided almost all the designs for the wallpapers, fabrics, and rugs that became a major part of the Firm's business from the 1870s, making it the chief supplier of furnishings for the Aesthetic House.

The Firm both supported and drew upon the friendships among its partners, and its products allowed the group continued integration of their professional production with their domestic consumption. Account books show that the members often took payment in furnishings for their own houses, continuing the exchanges that had cemented their collaboration at Red House even across the boundaries of double-entry bookkeeping. These exchanges of goods parallel the circulation of messages--cartoons and comments--through the pages of the same books, and indicate the artists' preferences for a non-monetary economy, at least among themselves. But the Firm did not repeat the experiment of Red House precisely. Morris's dream for Red House and the Firm foundered on the difficulties of integrating women into the worlds of work and camaraderie. Though the women did much of the embroidery and applied decoration for the Firm, they were not partners; Janey and Georgie now had children and the management of their family households, work that had not been adequately foreseen in the originally more egalitarian project. And before either of the other two couples could become permanent occupants of Red House, Lizzie Siddal died of an overdose of laudanum after a miscarriage and the Burne-Joneses, shaken by illness and the death of a child, no longer had the heart or the funds to become co-owners of an enlarged Red House. On hearing the news, Morris wrote sadly to Burne-Jones in 1864: "As to our palace of Art, I confess your letter was a blow to me at first, though hardly an unexpected one--in short I cried."

By 1865 Morris had to recognize that the "palace of Art," in the new sense that he wanted to give to the phrase, was not going to work exactly as he had hoped. He could not convert the temporary community of friends and fellow artists who had worked on Red House to a commercially viable art-business except at the cost of separating home and business, diminishing women's participation in the working fellowship. He could not both live and work in the palace of Art. Nor would the Firm enable him to transform the daily lives of his own workmen or of Victorian laborers and consumers. But Morris was a pragmatic idealist; though he was forced to give up Red House in 1865, after scarcely six years, the possibilities of life there continued to shape his thinking.

Rossetti moved into Tudor House after Lizzie died in 1862. It, too, became the setting for a decidedly un-Victorian domestic-cum-professional establishment, a different version of the mutual construction of the house and household through a culture of objects. Collecting old furnishings and Oriental pots avidly, Rossetti lavished time and most of his funds on the house and its eclectic contents. Unlike Red House, however, Tudor House was neither a marital house nor an experiment in collaborative work and play.

Where Morris anticipated a socialist reorganization of work and culture, Rossetti revived old relations of patronage in the shadow of the new art market. But revived with a difference: artists, not their patrons, were to head a hierarchy of cultural power that middle-class patrons would pay to serve. Rossetti's experiment at Tudor House used friendship to sustain an alternative to the art-business organized by professional dealers, annual exhibitions, and reviewers. He refused to exhibit publicly; instead, he cultivated highly personalized relations with clients who commissioned work directly from him (though he was not above using dealers when he thought he could control them). His friends were volunteer agents to recommend him to new buyers, a service he provided in turn for them. Objects as well as paintings were acquired or sold through this network of friends; indeed, the common bond among artist, agent, and client was often the desire for curious, exotic, artful objects and companionship in the competitive search through which it might be satisfied. High-spirited dinners in the long dining room above the river at Tudor House, or afternoons in Rossetti's book and object-filled studio, were the settings in which these relationships were played out. Rossetti could be an exuberant and generous host and friend, but to maintain Tudor House and sell his paintings he had to scheme relentlessly and bargain hard. The roles of maker and collector, artist, agent, client and friend overlapped in complex ways that even the adept Rossetti could not always manage successfully. His efforts to withdraw from the art market to a smaller circle of patronage and friendship, though it spared him the pressures of commercial dealing and popular taste, nonetheless exacted a price, and not only in the time and energy required to conduct his byzantine affairs. The relatively restricted number of clients with whom he dealt left him vulnerable to their deaths or loss of interest and discouraged him from venturing beyond the kinds of pictures that these few client-friends wanted.

The painting, like the objects it depicts, seems ever on the verge of exercising a will of its own over its supposed possessor.

Tudor House was crucial to Rossetti's attempt to turn his back on the established art market and survive through a small circle of patrons and friends. Those who wanted Rossetti's paintings to hang from their walls were attracted not just to his pictures but to the idiosyncratic vision and esoteric taste of their creator in his domestic setting: the strangely unsettling atmosphere of Tudor House, where artistic and exotic objects acquired again an "aura" of mysterious power lost in the crowded displays at the Crystal Palace, the Royal Academy, or the cluttered drawing rooms of an acquisitive bourgeoisie. To collect Rossetti's work was to join a self-selected circle of those who rejected the tasteless excesses of these displays to create in their own houses a ritual space for the contemplation of art, re-sacralizing the aesthetic in defiance of mass consumption.

The paintings that prospective purchasers encountered at Tudor House were large, obsessively repetitive images of sensuous women surrounded by lushly painted flowers, jewels, mirrors, and items from Rossetti's or his friends' collections. In these images, more like elaborate still-lives than portraits or subject pictures, the female face and figure is aestheticized while the objects surrounding and adorning the woman are assimilated to her faintly hostile, strangely remote pose and gaze. The ambiguous character of these images--aesthetic objects endowed with an unsettling, alien life--might be taken as comment on the troubling role of the painting itself as part of the collections of objects that furnish Rossetti's or his clients' rooms. Has the painter, like a good workman, simply produced a beautiful object, or does the painting borrow life from the sitter, or perhaps from the artist himself, bringing another mind and will into the presence of the viewer? The painting, like the objects it depicts, seems ever on the verge of exercising a will of its own over its supposed possessor. Something of this potentially terrifying life of objects, one suspects, both attracted and troubled those who bought Rossetti's works --wealthy merchants and professionals whose success depended on the culture of objects that reached out, through Rossetti's pictures, to challenge the domination they might imagine they exercised over the world of goods.

The houses of these Pre-Raphaelites in the 1860s give a different inflection to the language that houses might be supposed to speak. Pierre Bourdieu interprets this language as a statement of the household's "cultural capital"--no less necessary to the establishment of bourgeois social status than economic capital and sometimes a substitute for it. Popular advice books in the 1870s and '80s agreed: the decoration of the house made visible the occupants' expertise in "the culture of Beauty," enjoined not as recreation but as essential to the proper presentation of the aspiring household. Artists' houses in the 1870s, '80s, and '90s speak this language fluently. Morris and Rossetti, however, used the material art assembled in their houses to testify at once to their cultural resources and to what they hoped to do differently with them: to support other forms of social relation in domestic life (the multi-marital and the non-marital) and provide alternatives to the business of art that would restore value to the aesthetic in the world of goods. Before the end of the decade, however, Red House was a remembered dream while Rossetti was an increasingly unhappy prisoner to the demands of his house and its narrowing circles of art and friendship. The Earthly Paradise and "The House of Life" reflect, from Morris's and Rossetti's altered perspectives in 1870, on what it means to install the world of goods in a Palace of Art. These are both poems about objects in houses.

he Earthly Paradise opens with a gesture that calls attention to the book as a material object. In the framing story, a band of aged and defeated European questers after the secret of immortality have washed up on the shores of an unknown island whose inhabitants left Greece long ago. They are offered shelter for their remaining years in return for relating, once a month, the stories they bring from their homelands. The presiding Elder of the host city compares the arrival of the voyagers to the discovery of "some ancient chronicle/Of that sweet unforgotten land long left."

--Think, with what joyous hearts, what reverence,
What songs, what sweet flowers we should bring it thence,
What images would guard it, what a shrine
Above its well-loved black and white should shine!
How it should pay our labour day by day
To look upon the fair place where it lay;
With what rejoicings even should we take
Each well-writ copy that the scribes might make,
And bear them forth to hear the people's shout . . .
Such, sirs, are ye, our living chronicle. . . .

The tale-tellers and the discovered manuscript to which they are compared are equally to be revered as visible, physical presences that bring pleasure to the community in themselves (as beautiful, old, and slightly exotic objects or persons) as well as the promise of future pleasures when they are heard or read. The gesture is repeated several times: the tale-teller for May places a book on the table before he begins to speak. Like the listeners, readers of Morris's poem are reminded that stories always have an embodied form as manuscripts or books or in the persons of oral tale-tellers. Morris planned to make the material form of his own poem an object to bring pleasure to those who possessed it. Burne-Jones was to provide the images to guard it, and he would himself engrave them, turning craftsman to make his book a visual pleasure to "pay our labour day by day." (The published form of the poem in 1870 was much simpler; Morris had to wait until he established his own press in the 1890s to produce the fine examples of the crafted book that he envisioned.)

The text of the poem, however, adopts craft models in other important ways. Like the tale-teller or his analogue, the scribe, the author of The Earthly Paradise does not claim to be the originator of its stories. He presents himself (in the lyric prologue and epilogue) as another reteller of old tales--an "idle singer." These are modest claims. But the singer and the scribe, like the engraver, are essential to give the story forms that we can hear and see. What they produce is more than a copy; it acquires the status of a separate work. Behind the scenes the author has also been active as collector and arranger, juxtaposing Greek with northern European legends, framing interludes with tale-telling, lyric with narrative sections, devising a pattern that appears as infinitely extendable as the rhythms of the verse itself--as the friends to whom Morris insisted on reading it aloud while he spun it out at the prodigious rate of hundreds of lines a day were uncomfortably well aware. (Georgie Burne-Jones confesses to pricking herself with pins to keep awake; Ned and Rossetti responded with pointed caricatures.) These unpretentious acts--authorship as enunciation, inscription, collection, arrangement--preserve the original stories by giving them the forms in which we are to find some part of our pleasure.

(Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum)

The Poet-Singer. Although William Morris's readings of the Earthly Paradise tried the patience of friends and family, his recitations were, nevertheless, tolerated with good humor, as these caricatures reveal. In the drawing at left, Edward Burne-Jones captures his response on one such occasion.

In Rossetti's cartoon at right, "The M's and Ems," Jane Morris undergoes a dual regime of medicinal waters and doses of her husband's Earthly Paradise at a German spa.

(Courtesy of the British Museum)

Within the texts of the stories, the poet-singer gives us the pleasure of beautiful form primarily through description, particularly of things that are themselves ornamented and decorated: clothing, palaces, formal gardens, dishes, furniture. The stories maintain a subtle eroticism, the tension of desire for the elusive lovers or distant kingdoms whose rule the seeker strives to achieve or preserve. But for listeners and readers that desire is more immediately entwined about the world of beautiful objects that the poem constantly places in our path. The poem itself, however, does not have the same qualities as the precious object; its style does not call attention to the skills of the poet as poet. Morris's versification is straightforward, even rather dull, avoiding or smoothing away most of the tension of speech in favor of metrical regularity, inventing few novel figures to surprise and slow the flow of the verse. Morris himself found physical pleasure in crafts that demanded rhythmic repetition--composing verse or reading it aloud, or, in later years, weaving--but modern readers, like the long-suffering audience of his friends, lack the habit of listening to long stretches of rhythmically repetitive verse that would allow us to follow and participate, to set our own inner rhythms to the beat of the verse and allow its subtler tensions to adjust our expectations and become a source of pleasure. By deliberately taking such repetitive craft-work as his model, however, Morris was attempting something he had been unable to achieve through his commercial business, where he made objects only for the homes of the rich. This modest verse, especially as published in ordinary trade form, would reach a much larger audience. The Earthly Paradise (the evidence of his sleepy friends notwithstanding) proved quite popular with middle-class Victorians, who after all did read aloud more than we do, particularly in domestic settings.

For Morris, then, The Earthly Paradise remembers the fellowship of making he had first imagined at Red House. Paradise is not the land where no one dies that the questers sought, but here in a present enriched through the collaborative making and using of beautiful things or the telling and hearing of these stories. The quests, falling short of what they were meant to achieve, leave the questers full of regret if not despair, remembering only the pains and losses they have suffered along the way. As they retell stories of other questing lives, their faces kindle; they seem to live again their old quests. But this repetition, held in the rhythms of verse, restores some of the enjoyment they never found, or did not stop to take, while they were bound to a receding goal. Tellers and listeners feel the emotional tension of reawakened desires, but in the retelling they discover the pleasure of sustaining desire with the lesser beauties of rooms and gardens and objects and the rhythms of the activity itself--and survive the partial disappointment of that desire so as to face death as the closure that is not only unavoidable but aesthetically necessary. Morris offers poetry not as a difficult art for the few but as a craft for the many.

To restore pleasure through such shared activity, Morris came to believe, is an important function of art, and particularly so when the labor of ordinary life is divorced from play or beauty, the condition of modern life that he, like Ruskin and Marx, deplored. The Earthly Paradise depicted in the poem is a place and time within this life where collective retelling and hearing of stories can enrich otherwise barren, wasted lives. In another sense, however, the Earthly Paradise first glimpsed in the experiences at Red House belongs to a more distant moment when a compensatory poetry will not be necessary. As he was later to suggest in News From Nowhere, his utopian imagination of life after a socialist revolution in England, in that future "Epoch of Rest," people may have little use for retelling stories of the past (though as a man of his own times Morris himself would regret the loss), because ordinary life and labor will incorporate beauty and play. The decorative arts will flourish and everyone will practice them. There will be no need for the poet to remember and retell old tales to bring the pleasures of ornament and repetition to impoverished lives.

(More, to Part 3 of 3)

Ideas Director's Desk | Pre-Raphaelite Arts | Private and Social Reading | Poems | Recollections | African Loom to American Quilt | The Practice of Reading