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Caroline Arscott Word Count Without Footnotes 7, 062 Without Footnotes, 8, 484 with Footnotes Caroline Arscott word count without footnotes 7, 062 without footnotes, 8, 484 with footnotes ABSTRACT Caroline Arscott, ‘William Morris’s tapestry: metamorphosis and prophecy in The Woodpecker’. This essay discusses William Morris’s adoption of tapestry in the 1880s in terms of its allegorisation of the losses and gains of both historical and biological processes. The processes of tapestry itself, the movement of the shuttle and positioning of the weft and the gradual building up of the image are considered in relation to the prophetic mode deployed by Morris in the verses written on his tapestries published in his Poems By the Way of 1891. The essay centres on the example of the tapestry The Woodpecker (exhibited 1888) where Morris’s woodpecker motif refers to the story of Picus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The context of metamorphosis leads to a discussion of the woodpecker’s significance in that Victorian revisiting of metamorphosis, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. This is contextualised by a discussion of other Victorian theorisations of evolution and the evolutionary emergence of consciousness. The essay discusses the morphology of form and the sequence of substitutions involved in sexual selection: the move from a reliance on the power of song to a recourse to instrumental music, and then a further move to the use of coloured display in creatures seeking an advantage in courtship. The declarative and the tacit aspects of Morris’s tapestry are addressed in order to assess the potential for the elaboration of grand themes in a form of art that seemingly abjures the grandiose theatre of human action. The woodpecker’s traditional identity as augur is considered alongside the discussion of morphology of form in this reassessment of William Morris’s tapestry. Caroline Arscott (The Courtauld Institute of Art) William Morris’s tapestry: metamorphosis and prophecy in The Woodpecker At the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1888, organised by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, William Morris exhibited his tapestry The Woodpecker (1885, fig. 1) which shows a fruit-laden tree on which are perched two birds, on the left a songbird or large finch of some sort with a fruit-eater’s beak, though not shown singing or feeding and on the right the woodpecker that gives the tapestry its name.1 It is a remarkable work completed by a painstaking process of hand-loom work and wholly designed by him unlike most of the tapestries produced by Morris & Co where a division of labour characterised the design process as well as the handcrafting. Huge acanthus leaves are wrapped around the trunk of the tree mainly belonging to a single scarf-like form wrapping from the right, over the forking branch and behind the main stem. The roughly-hewn, framing posts are wound around with honeysuckle. Little edges of blossom show from behind the banner at top and bottom, showing that this garlanded frame continues on all four sides. The large honeysuckle blossoms are symmetrically arrayed, and there is a pattern from the bottom; the blossom is inwards- facing first, then faces forwards in huge, wheel-like forms, then outwards, forwards, inwards, forwards and inwards again at the top. This regular patterning gives an ornamental order to the border distinguishing it from the central pictorial motif.2 An assortment of flowers which we can tentatively identify as tulips, marigolds, buttercups, pimpernel, aquilegia and lilies show up in the gaps left by the acanthus. Above and below the tree, verses by William Morris are spelt out in embroidery on the banner area of the tapestry. The verses link the motif of the woodpecker to the figure of Picus whose story is recounted by Ovid. He was a gaily-clad king, hunting in the forest who was entrapped by Circe; she made thick fogs descend so that he lost his way. The enchantress changed the bright cloak and brooch of the king to coloured plumage as he was metamorphosed into a woodpecker, confined forever to the forest. The lower half of the design with its vigorous, hyperbolic swathes of giant foliage has a somewhat different character than the upper part where boughs, leaves, fruit and birds are more regular in their disposition and more legible in spatial terms. Both upper and lower zones are notable for the filling up of the visual field, but the lower achieves this repletion in more chaotic and mysterious ways, apparently referencing the story’s episode of reduced visibility in the enchanted fogs. The verses on the tapestry can be considered in two instalments. The verses at the top: ‘I once a king and chief / now am the tree bark’s thief’ presents the transformation of Picus in sequential terms, from man to bird. The verses on the bottom: ‘Ever twixt trunk and leaf / chasing the prey’ indicate a continuum, the bird’s ongoing hunt for insect prey. The positioning of the verses gives us the option of reading them in parallel like this; the top verses tell a story of becoming, those at the bottom one of being. When they are taken as a single sequence the overall story is a de-evolutionary one of the shift from becoming to being, one might say from the possession of agency as a conscious man to the involuntary actions of the unconscious brute. The motif of the tapestry impels the viewer to counter this story by one that runs the other way in the direction of growth and movement in the vegetation, so that a theme of the transition from the unconscious to the conscious or from lower forms of life to higher ones is also present. Victorian culture was preoccupied with questions of the emergence of consciousness and the possibility of conscious action being accompanied by unconscious cerebration. Challenging conceptions of a variable relationship existing between involuntary and voluntary action were developed by those thinkers and writers who reconceptualised the nature of body and mind in the light of debates over evolution. Darwinian proponents of evolution developed experimental investigations into consciousness and the nervous system and wrote in philosophical vein on issues of subjectivity. This group of intellectuals included George Henry Lewes (1817-1878), Henry Maudsley (1835-1918) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903).3 They argued that far from a dualistic relationship existing between, on one side, a mechanical corporeal element where actions were involuntary and, on the other, a conscious volitional agency lodged in the brain, the human organism should be considered holistically as a single system. In this system the involuntary could be rendered voluntary (as in the slowing down of heartbeat) and the voluntary could become involuntary (as the child’s attention in learning to walk gave way to effortless walking in later life). Learned skills habitually exercised, whether mathematics or craft gave evidence of the voluntary becoming involuntary. The discussions undertaken by this group revised the terms in which the subject was conceived. The melding of body and mind that was explored also led on to a notion of the coexistence and interchangeability of objective and subjective aspects of experience. Discussion of evolution in Britain was dominated by two figures: Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Spencer, in his account of evolution emphasised the increasing differentiation and specialisation as organisms adapt to their environment and pass down the characteristics that they have developed. His initial formulations drew more on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) than on Darwin. With this comes a concentration or coordination of the organism as mental powers develop. In Principles of Psychology (1855, second edition 1870) he established a distinction between purely physical being and the mental or psychological capabilities of higher organisms. Lower organisms are decentred and are constituted entirely by their physiology without psychological attributes. Higher organisms with centralised nervous systems display the singularity that in mankind characterises willed conscious thought. Evolution gives the move to the higher from the lower. Spencer argues that the higher beings maintain their physiological existence; in the current state of evolution the mind has not banished the body, the psychological dimension of humankind’s being is therefore added to physiology. The psychological is described as sequential. A single train of conscious thought is available to human subjects. The physiological is described by Spencer, by contrast, as being simultaneous; he gives the examples of coexistent corporeal systems, circulatory, respiratory, digestive etc. and of decentred lower organisms where independent life can be maintained if portions are divided off.4 There are ways in which the physiological is, in addition, sequential: bodily changes over time in maturation and senility occur to the organism. The psychological therefore is purely sequential, according to Spencer while the physiological is both simultaneous and sequential. This has a bearing on the presentation of (sequential) becoming and (simultaneous) being in William Morris’s tapestry. In a discussion of the example of the starfish Spencer points to a dispersed, decentralised organism where each segment is somewhat autonomous. He describes the nerve threads in the separate arms of the starfish and the way that that each has its own ganglionic centre; there is linkage at a central point but this coordination is minimal. ‘What elementary psychical changes the creature manifests, take place simultaneously in different parts of its body: each part separately responding to the impressions made on it.’5 In the contrast between the class of Radiata (including starfish) and the class of Articulata (including worms, spiders and insects) he points to the emergence of a more effectively coordinated nervous system. In this way he sees a transition from being to becoming, from simultaneity to sequence, from the merely physiological to embodied psychical.
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