KELMSGOTT HOUSE 



of a large section of the Socialist League of which he had been 

 the moving spirit, seceded from it, together with some of his 

 personal friends and neighbours, and formed an independent 

 branch called the " Hammersmith Socialist Society," the object 

 of which was to spread the principles of Socialism peacefully. 

 The meetings took place twice a week until, some time after Morris's 

 death, the affair came to a natural ending. They were held in 

 the large room built out of the stable and coach-house in which 

 he had first set up the carpet looms, on which were woven under 

 his immediate eye, the beautiful Hammersmith carpets. 



Until his removal to Merton Abbey, Morris was not able to 

 weave carpets larger than twelve feet square, for the space at his 

 disposal did not allow it. He designed them entirely himself, begin- 

 ning as one does in setting to work on a picture, by making a small, 

 careful design in his case to be enlarged by assistants on point 

 paper, divided into minute spaces, each representing a particular 

 bit of the carpet, or the proposed painting. The designs he coloured 

 carefully himself. When finished he sometimes spread the carpet 

 out on the lawn at Kelmscott House, in order that he might judge 

 properly of the effect. The drawing at the opening of this chapter 

 shows on the right the red- tiled roof of the apartment in which 

 the carpet looms were set up. 



Everybody knows Morris's famous rule, " Have nothing in 

 your house that you do not know to be useful, and believe to be 

 beautiful." He could quite conscientiously stretch it to include 

 not alone carpets and embroidery, and wall-paper and stained 

 glass, and metal work, but tapestry also ; and he did so, for when 

 he had mastered one art, he immediately hungered to wrestle with 

 another ; and by and by he set up a tapestry loom as well as a carpet 

 loom the first tapestry loom being that which, as we have seen, 

 he put up in his own bedroom at Hammersmith. His ambition 

 was to revive the splendid and famous Flemish and French tapestries 

 of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Arras, round which at 

 this very moment, the middle of April, 1917, surges the tide of 

 the most terrible war in history, was in the earlier part of the 

 fifteenth century the centre of the peaceful industry, and from it 

 wall-hangings came to be known as " Arras." Other Flemish 

 cities, notably Brussels, soon surpassed Arras in the manufacture. 

 The greatest artists of the time designed for them, indeed the 



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