I’ve always
liked those old volumes of poetry or criticism – often intended as school
editions – which have lists of essay or exam questions at the back, so that you
can test yourself out when you’ve finished the book. My volume of Matthew Arnold’s poems in the
King’s Treasuries of Literature is of this kind: ‘Do you consider that Arnold
was master of the sonnet?’; ‘Show that Arnold is at his best when describing
river scenery’; and so on. So too is my
old Macmillan Casebook anthology on The
Tempest: ‘How important is music in the play?’; ‘Trace the interplay of
feelings of wonder and disillusion in the play’, etc.
In the case
of Morris, we could compile a whole series of such exams from Fiona MacCarthy’s
1996 biography. Has any other biography
ever asked itself so many questions, some just rhetorical, others indicating
genuine puzzlement on the author’s part?
By extracting a run of these one could set a whole series of test papers
on Morris and his circle. So here, lifted
out pretty much at random, is a set of such questions to get your teeth into
(I’ve given page references in case you’re moved, after trying these, to look
up MacCarthy’s own answers to them):
1.How
original was Red House? (161)
2.Without
Morris in fact would there have been a Gertrude Jekyll? (165)
3.Why did Jason succeed where Guenevere failed? (204)
4.Were Janey
and Rossetti technically lovers? (225)
5. Is poetry
socially useful or superfluous? (240 – a rather big topic, I admit)
6.What did
Morris like so much about the sagas? (290)
7.A blue
movie Morris? (353 – an enigmatic little teaser, that one)
8.What did
Morris gain from Leek? (356 – the place, not the vegetable)
9.How
successful was the [carpet=making] episode?
How Eastern were these carpets? (405)
10.What has
been the reason for such longevity that even the well-educated middle classes
of late-twentieth-century Britain can measure out their generations in William
Morris rooms? (414)
11.But how
idealistic was the Firm now in
reality? (452)
12.How far
was Mrs Morris conscious of her son’s activities? (483)
There are in
fact so many self-posed questions in MacCarthy’s mighty tome that one could
repeat this exercise many times over.
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