Page 183

FROM MERTON ABBEY TO OLD
                     DEERFIELD
                            JANE PRATT
ILLIAM MORRIS, poet, so-
             cialist, craftsman, dreamed
             many dreams; also, he had
             a magic gift for making
dreams come true.
  In the year 1881, when he was forty-
eight years old, he bought some disused
print-works on the little river Wandle in
Surrey, only seven miles from London, and
set up there the Merton Abbey Works.
Here formerly Merton Abbey had stood;
nothing remained of it then except a bit of
crumbling wall. But when Morris brought
his looms and frames from London and put
them into the long, low buildings beside the
mill pond, the spirit of the Middle Ages,
the Middle Ages of the poet's imagination,
settled down over this quiet enclosure among
the trees.
  It was to mediveval times that Morris and
his associates looked for inspiration. Rus-
kin had pointed out the way to them, and
he had not preached in vain; here at Mer-
ton Abbey was craftsmanship joined with
art and workmen happy in their work. In-
stead of tall chimneys belching smoke, there
were poplars and willows hiding the build-
ings from the road; instead of the rumble
and roar of pitiless machines there was the
sociable whir of hand-looms and the song
of the birds; instead of dust and unwhole-
some fumes, there were fresh air, sunshine,
and the odor of the flowers in the old-fash-
ioned garden; instead of pale workmen,
deadened, yet alert, each one chained to his
great monster of a machine, there were
ruddy-faced men and girls interested in
what they were doing, and seeing the beau-
tiful fabrics grow under their hands with a
sort of personal affection.
  When William Morris moved his manu-
factures from London to Merton Abbey, the
business was already well established, and a
circular sent out at the time recounted that
the firm was prepared to furnish painted
glass windows, arras tapestry, carpets, em-
broidery, tiles, furniture, printed cotton
goods, paper hangings, figured    woven
stuffs, and furniture velvets and cloths.
  Burne-Jones, Morris's dearest friend
from Oxford days, painted the cartoons for
the stained glass windows; but little furni-
ture was made, and that not from Morris's
designs; it was to the embroidery, the car-
pets, the tapestry, the figured cloths and
the wall-papers that he gave most personal
attention.
  And personal attention meant a great
deal to William Morris. "One secret of
the excellence of Morris's own designs,"
says his biographer, "was that he never de-
signed anything which he did not know
how to produce with his own hands. He
had mastered the arts of dyeing and weav-
ing before he began to produce designs for
dyed and woven stuffs to be made in his
                                     183