urne-Jones were among the partners in this concern, which
undertook to supply the public with high art work in wall painting, paper
hangings, embroidery, carpets, tapestries, printed cottons, stamped
leather, carved furniture, tiles, metals, jewelry, etc. In particular,
Morris revived the mediaeval arts of glass-staining, illumination, or
miniature painting, and tapestry-weaving with the high-warp loom. Though
he chose to describe himself as a "dreamer of dreams born out of my due
time," and "the idle singer of an empty day," he was a tireless practical
workman of astonishing cleverness and versatility. He taught himself to
dye and weave. When, in the last decade of the century, he set up the
famous Kelmscott Press, devoted to artistic printing and book-making, he
studied the processes of type-casting and paper manufacture, and actually
made a number of sheets of paper with his own hands. It was his
favourite idea that the division of labour in modern manufactures had
degraded the workman by making him a mere machine; that the divorce
between the art of the designer and the art of the handicraftsman was
fatal to both. To him the Middle Ages meant, not the ages of faith, or
of chivalry, or of bold and free adventure, but of popular art--of "The
Lesser Arts"; when every artisan was an artist of the beautiful and took
pleasure in the thing which his hand shaped; when not only the cathedral
and the castle, but the townsman's dwelling-house and the labourer's
cottage was a thing of beauty. He believed that in those times there
was, as there should be again, an art by the people and for the people.
It was the democratic and not the aristocratic elements of mediaeval life
that he praised. "From the first dawn of history till quite modern
times, art, which nature meant to solace all, fulfilled its purpose; all
men shared in it; that was what made life romantic, as people call it, in
those days; that and not robber-barons and inaccessible kings with their
hierarchy of serving-nobles and other such rubbish." [31] One more
passage will serve to set in sharp contrast the romanticism of Scott and
the romanticism of Ruskin and Morris. "With that literature in which
romance, that is to say humanity, was re-born, there sprang up also a
feeling for the romance of external nature, which is surely strong in us
now, joined with a longing to know something real of the lives of those
who have gone before us; of these feelings united y