When he had to
describe himself by a single word, he called himself a designer. But
it is the latter branch of his art which principally concerns us now,
the art of a maker and adorner of stories. He became famous in this
kind of art also, both in prose and verse, as a romance-writer and a
poet. But he spoke of it as play rather than work, and although he
spent much time and great pains on it, he regarded it as relaxation
from the harder and more constant work of his life, which was carrying
on the business of designing, painting, weaving, dyeing, printing and
other occupations of that kind. In later life he also gave much of his
time to political and social work, with the object of bringing back
mankind into a path from which they had strayed since the end of the
Middle Ages, and creating a state of society in which art, by the
people and for the people, a joy to the maker and the user, might be
naturally, easily, and universally produced.
Even as a boy Morris had been noted for his love of reading and
inventing tales; but he did not begin to write any until he had been
for a couple of years at Oxford. His earliest poems and his earliest
written prose tales belong to the same year, 1855, in which he
determined to make art his profession. The first of either that he
published appeared in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which was
started and managed by him and his friends in 1856.
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