Authors and After Words

If, as we have already seen, C. S. Lewis was fond of the way George MacDonald fashioned his dream visions – he called them mythopoeic, i.e. both mythic and poetic – he was even more enthusiastic about the fantasy novels of William Morris. He read them in his youth as later generations would devour the Narnia Chronicles and Tolkien’s “Middle Earth” saga. Lin Carter was equally enthusiastic about Morris’s novels. In his introduction to Morris’s novel, The Wood Beyond the Word, he writes: “The book you hold in your hands is the first great fantasy novel ever written…By fantasy I mean the tale of quest, adventure or war set in an invented age and worldscape of the author’s own imagination.”

Carter goes on:

William Morris was born on March 24, 1834. He grew up in a well to do family with eight brothers and sisters. Though his father’s fortune was made speculating in copper mines, the family lived a semi-rural life, never far from forest and woods but still aware of the suburbs of London always encroaching upon the wooded landscape. As a child, he loved to dress in a set of child-sized medieval armor and ride about the estate on ponyback. He was said to have read all of the Waverley Novels by Sir Walter Scott by the time he was seven years old. He remained a devoted medievalist, and this fascination influenced his work throughout the rest of his very productive life.

In 1853, after a mixed education of public and private schooling, Morris entered Exeter College, Oxford, where he met and became friends with Edward Burne-Jones. Though they both intended to enter the clergy, they both left that career behind when their interests in the arts set them off on quite another direction. That friendship, along with others who joined them came to form a group of artists and craftsman who would bloom mightily in the last great inclusively European style known as art nouveau. William Morris and his design firm Morris and Company developed and supplied everything from stained glass fixtures to wallpaper and furniture, not the least of which was the famous Morris chair, the first reclining easy chair.

Morris was a phenomenon unto himself. Along with his achievements as a designer and manufacturer, he was well known as a poet – actually turning down the offer to become England’s poet laureate after the death of Tennyson. Beyond poetry he wrote neo-classical and neo-Scandinavian epic poems along with translations from both Greek and Scandinavian sources, socialist essays and political tracts (he was also an orator and political activist), books on art, design and architecture and historical fiction. Most importantly in our context, his three “fantasy romances” are still in print and it was these novels that paved he way for a whole generation of “fantasy romance” writers that would include Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, T. H, White, H. P. Lovecraft, Poul Anderson, Mervyn Peake, and most of all, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Gate Keeper indeed! Gate opener rather.

The “fantasy romances” in question are: The Wood Beyond the World (1894), The Well at the World’s End (1896) and The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897). Just what did Morris accomplish in these three books? Simply put, with his love of the past, he was able to organize the rich heritage of symbolic story telling, from fable to fairy tale, folk tale, and epic – all of the various elements of the story telling of past ages and mold them into the compact and dynamic form of the modern novel. But that isn’t all. Remembering Lin Carter’s description of the age: “God was dead, religion was a polite social custom, science was in full stride, and the Industrial Revolution was rapidly changing the face of the land…” it was an important part of Morris’s devout and mythic imagination to create a vehicle of fiction with an intriguingly subversive energy. Through his fabrications, he not only brought new life to past forms of story telling, he created a medium through which modern writers could, through the use of the symbolism of magic and other supernatural devises, present a spiritual dimension to human experience that would elude the proscriptions of the Enlightenment, 19th century scientism and the limitations of the popular “realistic” novel. Magic and magicians, in all their forms, suggest a world, indeed a universe, with powers that are greater than ourselves. Modern fiction generally alienates us and distances us from that world by presenting our experience as a largely interior and psychological process – a stream of consciousness which is solipsistically sufficient unto itself. (As in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, for example.) Fantasy reaches out to place us in a greater context – one which argues that we belong and that we are not alone.

Children are still open to that greater horizon. Of course, both MacDonald and Morris saw themselves as writing for adults. But, as C. S. Lewis points out in one of his essays on children and literature, fantasy, like old furniture, has been relegated to the nursery, as it were. So then, there is little alternative for the serious writer who is dealing with human experience at the truth level of myth, other than to assume the guise of a “children’s” author. The richness of that deception is one of the glories of modern and contemporary literature. We may thank our lucky stars for two such wide-eyed visionaries as George MacDonald and William Morris.

I wonder whatever happened to my grandmother’s Morris chair.