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Home , John Henry Dearle, Walter Crane, William Morris

Caroline Arscott word count without footnotes 7, 062 without footnotes, 8, 484 with footnotes

ABSTRACT Caroline Arscott, ‘’s : 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 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 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 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 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 (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 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.

When a nervous system makes its appearance, these incipiently-psychical changes

become slightly co-ordinated – have their various strands connected. As the

nervous system develops and integrates, the twisting of these various strands of

changes into one thread of changes grows more decided.6

The image of the coordinated nervous system as a twisted, multi-strand thread, bringing the dispersed physicality of the organism into a unity which allows for mental function is interesting to consider in the context of Morris’s tapestry where the twisting of plants around supports, the of weft around warp threads, and the twisting of fibres in making of a strand of tapestry wool or silk are all referenced or implicated. For Spencer the drive of evolution was towards this single sequence, away from dispersal and simultaneity, ultimately towards the fusing of the twisted thread into a single wire of pure intelligence. For him the logical development of biological phenomena was towards the rational and the increasing coherence, complexity and specialisation of systems whether cosmic, biological or social would establish the rights of individuals and a balance between competing claims without recourse to violence. It is important to acknowledge that in terms of his social theory this led to conclusions quite opposed to those of William Morris who moved to a

Marxist theory of communal solutions and in the 1880s.7

I wish to argue nevertheless that Spencer’s formulation is pertinent to the work of

Morris. In the discussion of the coordinated yet multiple nature of mental life Herbert

Spencer did acknowledge that mental life was not, at his own historical moment, entirely unified. In common with other psychologists of the period he recognised that consciousness could be divided, that distraction, memory, habit, daydreaming and unconscious motivation were significant. Writing about the strands of consciousness he said ‘But to the last their union remains imperfect. The vital actions constituting the subject-matter of Psychology, while distinguished from other vital actions by their tendency to assume the form of a single series, never absolutely attain that form’.8

Within his theory the acknowledgement that, at the current moment, the thread of consciousness contained many strands meant that the conscious was necessarily to be seen in a continuum with the unconscious and the psychological with the physical.

The grand social narrative that Spencer tells emphasises the triumphant emergence of becoming from being which in Morris’s tapestry might correspond to the emergence of the upper part of the tapestry though the processes of growth depicted and the process of making from bottom up. On the other hand Spencer’s account of twisted consciousness allows for an integration of being with becoming and for the tracing in consciousness of the most primitive ‘incipiently psychical’ elements. In Morris’s tapestry this would correspond to the reading of the upper and lower portions as parallel states which are bound up with one another. Along with this tapestry, at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1888 was another forest- themed work. This was a designed by (1845-1915) and printed by Jeffries &Co. with the title Wood Notes (fig. 2). Crane’s hunters surge through the woods, horns sounding, their hounds bounding beside them, tails up, tongues lolling. There is a strutting pheasant that paces to the music of the fauns on one side, which spins round on the other, fleeing with the deer as they are chased by dogs. The implied screech of the pheasant is matched by the blast of the hunter’s horn. This noisy wallpaper summons up the active mirthful energies of Milton’s

‘L’Allegro’ (1645) in its pastoral and sylvan episodes. The circling birds, apparently doves, at the hub point of the design are competing or courting and cooing. The chase and the dance are overlaid, the one over the other, in one revolving rhythm. The title of the design keys into the notes played on the flutes by fauns and on the wooden - pipes held by the curly headed boy-‘witness’. The phrase ‘wood notes wild’ occurs in Milton, and in his poem (‘L’Allegro’) refers at once to birdsong in the forest and to the verse of Shakespeare in the equivalent urban venue for mirth: the theatre. The wallpaper was advertised with a passage from Shakespeare: ‘WOOD-NOTES : /

“Under the greenwood tree / Who loves to lie with me / And turn his merry note /

Unto the sweet birds throat.” / : – Song in “As you like it.”’9

In comparison with Crane’s wallpaper, Morris’s tapestry seems remarkably tacit and still. One possibility is to see Morris’s tapestry as the equivalent to Milton’s ‘Il

Penseroso’ (1632) the melancholy partner to his Milton’s paean to mirth. What should we make of that woodpecker in the tapestry and why does the bird on the left neither feed nor sing? Morris, after all, specialised in birds that did both; he loved the spotted plumage of the song-thrush, the stretch of the throat in song and the hungry plundering, darting beaks of birds among vines or strawberry plants.10 This woodpecker spreads its adapted claws to grip the branch but does not rear up and strike the tree’s bark. Indeed it seems to settle its whole form, to wrap around the horizontal bough, roosting rather heavily. The standard way to show a woodpecker was to show it in upright, usually in profile gripping the vertical tree trunk, balancing itself with its tail in the action of hammering on the trunk. This is how it is shown in the ornithological work by Traviès Les oiseaux les plus remarquables (1857) published in London and .11 An etching of 1820 published by William Darton

(fig. 3) shows the male green woodpecker from the back, only the head is in profile but the bird is still in a business-like stance, ready to get to work with that prodigious beak on the bark of the tree and to make a racket; a woodpecker hammering can be heard up to half a mile away.12 Morris’s woodpecker is facing in the wrong direction, pointing its beak towards the fruit not to the bark.

This tapestry depicting a rather stupid woodpecker is here presented in the context of a discussion of the clever object. I will be arguing that cleverness is part of the tapestry’s concern and attributes. It is a clever object and it is concerned with cleverness. The embrace of metamorphosis, and along with this voicelessness and deflection are its cunning strategies. I will suggest that these strategies are proper to ornament and allowed Morris to reflect on the medium of tapestry that he had newly adopted. To expand on the discussion of temporality and evolution that has so far concentrated on the writings of Herbert Spencer this essay will make reference to the writings of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). In Darwin’s work the propositions of evolutionary theory obviously centring on morphology of form allow for a driving back of consciousness into lower organisms. I will go on to discuss the Darwinian discussion of bird calls, instrumental music and the display of colour in terms of voicelessness and turning away.

The relationship between mythical metamorphosis and Darwinian evolutionary development are intriguing since the suddenness of metamorphosis, as the gods wilfully change one organisation to another, for instance man to woodpecker, is unlike the gradual pace of natural selection which might operate over thousands of generations. The adaptations as Darwin describes them are, however, based on the emergence of variations in the first instance, always happening suddenly, even if the variation is minute. Natural selection ensures the retention of those that give any advantage. In his thinking on adaptation, natural selection and sexual selection

Darwin attended to the ingenuity of nature’s system which produces marvels like the woodpecker, most singular of birds, and the mistletoe or orchid, most extraordinary of plants.13 The woodpecker and the mistletoe are picked out at the very start of his notorious account of natural selection, The Origin of Species, 1859, in the introduction. He aims to establish

how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to

acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our

admiration. Naturalists continually refer to external conditions, such as climate,

food, &c., as the only possible cause of variation. In one very limited sense, as we

shall hereafter see, this may be true; but it is preposterous to attribute to mere

external conditions, the structure, for instance, of the woodpecker, with its feet,

tail, beak, and tongue, so admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of

trees. 14 In this he is responding to the challenge set up by Paley earlier in the nineteenth century who also responded to the astounding diversity and specialisation of natural form, arriving at different explanations but dwelling on the cleverness of the bird’s beak, feet and especially the tongue as mechanical contrivances perfectly designed for the task of catching insects under the bark.

The tongue of the woodpecker is one of those singularities, which nature presents

us with, when a singular purpose is to be answered. It is a particular instrument for

a particular use: and what, except design, ever produces such? The woodpecker

lives chiefly upon insects, lodged in the bodies of decayed or decaying trees. …

When … it has reached the cells of the insects, then comes the office of its tongue;

which tongue is, first, of such a length that the bird can dart it out three or four

inches from the bill, -- in this respect differing greatly from every other species of

bird; in the second place, it is tipped with a stiff, sharp, bony thorn; and, in the

third place (which appears to me the most remarkable property of all), this tip is

dentated on both sides, like the beard of an arrow or the barb of a hook. The

description of the part declares its uses. … If this be not mechanism, what is?

Should it be said, that, by continual endeavours to shoot out the tongue to the

stretch, the woodpecker's species may by degrees have lengthened the organ itself,

beyond that of other birds, what account can be given of its form, of its tip? how,

in particular, did it get its barb, its dentation? These barbs, in my opinion, wherever

they occur, are decisive proofs of mechanical contrivance.15

The woodpecker then has this perfect adaptation; its anatomy has the mechanical features of human-made tools. Darwin along with Paley wants to register the marvel, and to extend this sense of the awesome and the beautiful to the whole of nature. In

The Origin of Species Darwin makes the point that the woodpecker is singular but that the marvellous adaptation is everywhere, even in the tiniest elements of the natural world

How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another

part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another

being, been perfected? We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the

woodpecker and missletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite

which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird; in the structure of the

beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the

gentlest breeze; in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part

of the organic world.16

This response to the beauties of nature is not alien to the view of nature held by

Morris in which human craft is admired for its contrivances and the for their ability to register the multiplicity of nature and the solemnity of history. He says of tapestry weaving

...what a noble art it was once! To turn our chamber walls into the green woods of

the leafy month of June, populous of bird and beast; or a summer garden with man

and maid playing round a fountain, or a solemn procession of the mythical warriors

and heroes of old; that surely was worth the trouble of doing ..17

His notion of beauty required the artefact to be consonant with nature

...everything made by man’s hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or

ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant

with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be indifferent [...] Now it is one of the chief

uses of decoration, the chief part of its alliance with nature, that it has to sharpen our dulled senses in this matter: for this end are those wonders of intricate patterns

interwoven, those strange forms invented, which men have so long delighted in:

forms and intricacies that do not necessarily imitate nature, but in which the hand

of the craftsman is guided to work in the way that she does, till the web, the cup, or

the knife, look as natural, nay as lovely, as the green field, the river bank, or the

mountain flint.18

The impact of Darwin on the biological sciences meant that the generation of ‘strange forms’ in nature was being looked at afresh, on the basis of the conviction that the diversity of nature was purposeful: biological forms embodied functional adaptations.

Morris’s argument is that to attain beauty, the craft items (, vessel and tool) have to match the ingenuity of nature. This is not just to say that they must adapt their form to their function, though this is part of the position he takes, but that they must, in imitating nature’s working method match the extraordinary diversity and loveliness of nature. Darwin’s repeated invocation of the woodpecker as an example of ‘beautiful co-adaptation’ makes it possible that Morris chose the motif to signal this aspect of artistic invention.

This brings us back to the oddity of the woodpecker’s position in Morris’s tapestry, however. A woodpecker that is not tapping, that has turned away from the trunk, can be conceived of as representing a series of deflections. The bird has moved to the flat from the upright. Certain birds can be understood as substituting instrumental tapping for birdsong. The bird in the tapestry has however turned to colour instead of sound for its purposes. In Darwin’s writings the woodpecker is singled out when such substitutive moves are discussed.19 The idea of substituting cries for birdsong is addressed in Darwin’s extensive discussion of sexual selection in The Descent of Man (1871). Indeed various outstanding characteristics of creatures are discussed in terms of alternative methods of attracting the opposite sex. The development of beautiful birdsong is explained in terms of the advantage of the male who can sing outstandingly in attracting the female. This, as has been pointed out, is the primary location of the purely aesthetic driver for evolution in Darwin’s writings and depends on his conviction that creatures have intelligence and an aesthetic sense an emphasis that is quite unlike the emphasis on the evolutionary top spot allocated to human beings by Spencer.20 In an evolutionary process the best singers have the advantage and the propensity for song is confirmed and emphasised over generations.21 The green woodpecker, selected by

Morris (identifiable by the red flash on its cheek) does not sing but has a loud laughing cry that gives it the common name of the yaffle bird. Its cry is to be heard particularly before rain. The foretelling of rain was linked to its role in certain myths as an augur and its identification with the thunder god.22 Other woodpeckers are almost without voices. According to Darwin, if a bird such as the woodpecker does not have a complex song, and is able to emit a harsh cry at best, it has to rely on other features for sexual enticement. This is how the woodpecker’s hammering on the tree is explained, described by Darwin under the heading of ‘instrumental music’.

The various species of woodpeckers strike a sonorous branch with their beaks, with

so rapid a vibratory movement that their head appears to be in two places at once.’

The sound thus produced is audible at a considerable distance [...] As this jarring

sound is made chiefly during the breeding season, it has been considered as a love-

song; but is perhaps more strictly a love-call.23 Darwin spent some time considering the kinds of adaptations in birds that enabled them to produce ‘instrumental music’ where there bodies were used to make sound rather than their larynxes. The standard form represented by the female underwent changes when, in the male, feathers were thickened, shaped and adapted to make them into rattles and whistles for instrumental music.24 In the woodpecker the volume and quality of the sound is achieved by the use of the beak and hollow branch as twin resonators. Charles Kay in his book of 1898 on the mythology of birds Bird Gods identified the hammering activity as the making of martial music by a bird recognised from its blood red hood and eye as the bird of Mars (by analogy with the planet

Mars).25 This is the account he gives of the drumming:

Since then I have learnt from better, more patient observers how the woodpecker

accomplishes his martial music. By quick vigorous blows of his beak the dead

branch is set in vibration; then he lays his hollow beak against the vibrating wood

to add resonance to the peal. A true performer on the xylophone he varies his

drumming by springing from one branch to another and thus gets a change of note.

26

The sound travels between the body of the tree and the body of the bird linking the two.

Morris’s woodpecker is not hammering; indeed it appears to be neither singing, calling out nor playing its instrument. Darwin offers one further form of alternative, substitutive adaptation for the purposes of sexual selection and that is the development of impressive coloured plumage. Colour is the alternative to sound as he clearly states. It is also remarkable that the birds which sing are rarely decorated with brilliant

colours or other ornaments. Of our British birds, excepting the bullfinch and

goldfinch, the best songsters are plain-coloured. The king-fisher, bee-eater, roller,

hoopee, woodpeckers, &c., utter harsh cries; and the brilliant birds of the tropics

are hardly ever songsters. Hence bright colours and the power of song seem to

replace each other. 27

Morris’s woodpecker tacitly displays its red cap and pied wings and tail feathers just as the honeysuckle shows forth its flowers and the fruit tree offers its round and bright orange fruit. The colours stand in for sound; we could rephrase this as there being a turn away from song (or its instrumental substitute) to colour. The reorientation of the woodpecker from a standard functional pose encourages to think of this as ‘turning away’. Is this turn, ultimately to colour, analogous to the twist of the thread as it turns round the warp? It is important to register that Darwin’s theory positions the evolutionary action of sexual selection as a turning away from the evolutionary logic of functional adaptation in the system of natural selection. The brightly coloured plumage attracts the females so the bird’s form changes to secure an advantage in sexual competition but this does not necessarily tally with an advantage in functional terms, indeed it can be at odds with function, the bright woodpecker is not thereby stronger, better at hunting or safer.28

Morris’s woodpecker does have a voice, as we have seen, in the verses that run along the scroll at top and bottom of the tapestry. The bird speaks as the transformed King

Picus of Ovid. We can ask what kind of voice this Ovidian figure can have. Bruce

Clarke in a book of 1995, draws on Bakhtin to make a distinction between the voice of the hero in , for instance, and that of the metamorph in Ovid. A process is traced whereby the grand cosmological transformations traced by Hesiod, as ages shift one to another, golden to silver, bronze to iron give way to the individuated and arbitrary metamorphoses presented by Ovid. The voice of the Homeric hero who resists, Clarke argues, is unlike that of metamorph in Ovid which is the voice of the victim who no longer resists, who has to speak without access to the epic. The field of the universe and nature in all its grandeur is reduced to the body of the individual with its potential for debasement. Clarke makes the distinction in these terms:

from the body of nature in its beneficence and terror to the human body in its

processes and private obscenities.29

Picus was a handsomely clad King who rode out proudly on the hunt with his purple cloak and golden clasp. The field of human society, politics, warfare and courtly display from which he came is the realm of narrative, and potentially epic narrative.

Circe reduces him to animal existence, foraging, literally grubbing, inserting his long tongue in the insterstices of the tree, ‘twixt trunk and leaf’. The woodpecker is taken by Morris as a being who has relocated the epic struggles of history into the close network of stems and foliage, indeed arguably into the tissues of bodily fabric. The outer arena of action has been blotted out by Circe’s fogs, a realm of soft touch and woolly muffling allows the rhythms of the active woodpecker to continue without resonance but still travelling, as the sound waves did, between vegetal and animal substance. Clothing was turned to plumage in the metamorphosis achieved by Circe.

In a like metamorphosis the pictorial capabilities of the tapestry brings together the animal stuff of the weft and the vegetable fibre of the warp to shape animal and vegetable forms both. The rhythms that replace the hammering of the woodpecker are the rhythms of those turning honeysuckle blossoms, of the orange globes that come to the fore and appear behind other leaves and branches, of the sweeping acanthus that dips and rises and wraps around the trunk of the tree. Ultimately of course these rhythms are the rhythms of the tapestry maker’s shuttle and the maker’s hand as they pass with the coloured woollen or silken threads in front and behind the vertical, cotton-thread warp of the tapestry.

It is very likely that Morris with his language skills would have noticed that ‘warp’ derives from the Old Norse (and Icelandic), varp meaning the cast of a net. We can ask what kind of entrapment is being depicted or enacted and what kind of bodies are involved in this project of venery. The prince has been caught by Circe and forced into animal form and reduced consciousness. His trapped body, reduced to its physiological functions, is in the tapestry. There is the potential to see the threads of the weft as being like the flexible woodpecker tongue going in among the matrix of the tree and the bark, which is itself a net that has caught insects. The woodpecker’s tongue acts analogously to the hand of the maker whose automatic corporeal actions are present in the woollen image. The woodpecker is thereby identified both with the weft and the body of the maker whose trained hand moves with an action that is in part involuntary. Furthermore Morris might propose the coloured woodpecker as a lure within the tapestry as whole, conceiving of the tapestry as a trap or net. In this case the coloured woodpecker serves to stimulate and entrap the viewer as the sexually stimulated female woodpecker would be enticed by the bird’s colours.

Consequently the pictorial substance of the tapestry will ultimately encompass the body of the prey. Just as the cotton warp catches and distributes the woollen and silken threads of the weft the tapestry will contrive to make the viewer physically occupy the space of the tapestry. The Darwinian context allows for an identification between the body of the tapestry and the entrapped viewer in the position of the admiring desirous female creature.30 Picus, maker, lure and viewer are all caught in the tapestry’s varp and are distributed and decentred, primitivised in their physical being.

The question is whether this metamorphosis into primarily physical being is registered as melancholic loss or whether the tapestry offers, as I would prefer to argue, a counter movement in which the relationship between physical and psychical, between being and becoming is revisited in mirthful and utopian terms. Morris does not leave us in the melancholy world of Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’. The woodpecker’s crafty hammering is not lost, it is turned away or metamorphosed; the augural yaffle cry is not cancelled, it is assumed by the tapestry itself which takes on a prophetic role. I would be inclined to argue that in the act of metamorphosis undertaken by the tapestry’s picture making, the heroic voice said to be lost in Ovid, is restored, nature even on the scale of the cosmos is reclaimed. For Morris the remove under the surface into the processes of the individual body does not imply degradation or the assumption of the victim’s voice, nor does it involve a sundering from the forces of the cosmos. Just as the woodpecker’s silenced rhythm is transposed into the rhythm of ornament and the rhythm of craft production, so the silenced prophetic cry is assumed by the medium of tapestry itself.

In the enthusiasm for comparative mythology in the 1880s and 1890s Jane Harrison

(1850-19280), H. Colley March (1838-1916) and Charles De Kay among others identified the appearance of the woodpecker and figures identified with the woodpecker in Norse, Celtic and classical myths: various gods, prophets and augurs.

The bird was also identified by the mythographers as a keeper of treasure and as being believed to have the secret of a magical plant that would spring open any lock. The ability to spring open the complex lock can be understood as being linked to the bird’s prophetic function. The voice of this bird that neither sings nor cries is the voice of encryption and promises decryption. We can ask ‘what is augured?’

The verses that are woven into the tapestry appeared with other verses taken from or referring to other tapestries in Morris’s Poems By the Way (1891). These brief poems sum up the subject of the tapestry in each case, whether an orchard, a tree, a deity like

Flora or Pomona or a creature. ‘The Woodpecker’ offers the double identity King and forest bird, describing a move from the social to the natural. Other verses also play with double identities in a manner akin to riddles, pairing the growing plant with the adaptation to human use, or the high mythological with the common practical. So the oak resists the wind when growing but runs before the wind when crafted into a sea going vessel. Here the move is from the natural to the social. The apple has mythological status in the story of Adam and practical use for rustic labourers in the form of cider. The mulberry is stained red in mythology by the tragic flow of a lover’s blood and in practical use its leaves go to feed silk worms to make lovers’ raiment.31 In the case of the orange tree the paradoxical doubleness relates to light and darkness.32 The orange tree has qualities of scent and colour that seem to challenge darkness, instantiated by the darkness of its own foliage.

There is an awareness of the multiple role played by the materials in the woven pictures and actually or potentially in the scene represented. This in the case of the poem ‘The Flowering Orchard’ relating to a silk embroidery is vested in the mulberry tree which produces the silk for the leaves for silk production.33 This self- referentiality involves the shift we saw in the poem for the oak tree from nature to craft, but also describes a shift from the realm of representation, the silken scene which could be an index of high culture with its potentiality for tragedy to the realm of production described in terms of low culture with its comedic aspect. These poems align metamorphosis as we have seen it in the story of Picus with the processes of arts and crafts. If this was the whole story then the claims of Morris’s tapestry would be very close to the claims of Walter Crane’s wallpaper design, which sought to evoke the mirth in rustic and urban entertainments celebrated by Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ twinning the rustic comedic tale-telling and the sophisticated urban playwriting.

Alternatively a case can be made for the enigma to have something to do with the capability of biological growth, for instance plant growth to contain the future, for the autumnal tree to contain the seeds for future growth. The metamorphoses of Ovid’s story can be brought into the same frame as the evolutionary changes that allowed the woodpecker’s tongue to stretch and its plumage to intensify and glow with colour.

The slow process of building a picture in threads of wool or silk, each curved around the thread of the warp is analogous to the long timescale of evolution. The incremental changes in nature are in the crafting of the tapestry; the image grows upwards from the bottom on the high warp frame. My broader argument leads me to the conclusion that the enigma is analogous to that theorised in the philosophical writings on psychology and evolution in the period. The theories that posited the twisting together of body and mind, involuntary actions (and responses to external stimuli) and voluntary engagement with the stuff of self and environment, made it possible to retain an equivocation about the balance between the physical and the mental. Being and becoming were no longer truly alternatives to one another. A sense of agency and therefore of destiny could be vested in corporeal or organic substance.

The enigmatic tapestry of 1887, The Forest, (with and J. H. Dearle, fig.

4) was produced after The Woodpecker and, like that tapestry, exhibited at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1888. It has a set of animals that incorporate an acanthus- like turn into their bodies.34 These are creatures that watch – or even less actively than ‘watch’ they see, as the verse on the tapestry says:.

the beasts that be in woodland waste,

now sit and see, nor ride nor haste

They wait, for the future, for the prophetic outcome, we might say, rather than looking backwards to the recorded events of history. These are beings registered in their subjectivity but given in terms of being and duration rather than the punctual efforts of action. Their biological being is compared to the vegetable growth around them.

The evolutionary time-frame is one that allows metamorphosis to occur. That metamorphosis produces beauty.

Morris is proposing a revision of the epic and the mythological. He does not go to the courts and battle fields of antiquity as historic tapestries did, finding an alternative source of drama and magic in the substance of the everyday and the stuff of nature.

His Pomona (1884-5) with a figure by Burne-Jones is another tapestry where the fruitfulness of nature is a marvel in itself, a tapestry that could be woven on a huge scale, almost ten feet in height.35 We are told of the potentiality of nature, the potential for the emergence of the fruit: ‘Evermore a unseen betwixt the blossom and the bough’. The theme of the interstice recurs here, those in-between spaces were the insect-rich hunting grounds of the woodpecker, here they are stated to be the very dwelling place of the Apple-Queen. Potentiality is in substance but the future is also beyond existent being, in the tiny space between this and that.36 Once again the method of tapestry is alluded to since the in-between is the locus of the thread in the weave. The movement of history produces loss, as eras, struggles and monuments pass away:

Ah, where’s the river’s hidden Gold

And where the windy grave of Troy?

We can imagine the thread located with the weaver behind the tapestry. However the verses immediately follow with an emergence, as Pomona speaks.

Yet come I as I came of old.

From out the heart of Summer’s joy.

The weaver’s hand moves between the lines of the warp, fruit comes forth in the harvest, Pomona’s presence belies the losses of history, the biological prevails in the move away from the heroic phases of history. The coloured thread that comes to fore signals all this. The repeated rhythm of the year in its phases of blossom and fruiting and bare branches are analogised in the tiny steps of loss and gain that go to make up the fabric of the tapestry. For Morris with his socialist politics of the 1880s it also signals the possibility of the emergence of a new form of society. The cleverness of

Morris’s tapestry is not in the ability to trap and degrade the victim as Circe traps

Picus. An interpretation of the work in terms of metamorphic de-evolution would understand the organic physicality of the work and the decorative decentring available to tapestry as melancholic and degraded. On the contrary Morris’s tapestry is able to keep two time frames in play: an epic one of becoming and a pre-social one of being. The double structure of the riddle puts the woodpecker’s brightly coloured form at a meeting point where these apparently contradictory time frames can coexist.

FIGURE LIST

Fig. 1 Morris & Co., The Woodpecker, tapestry, wool and silk on cotton warp, designed by William Morris, woven by William Knight and William Sleath, 1885 at

Merton Abbey on a ‘high-warp’ loom, , .

Fig. 2 Advertisement reproduction of the 'Wood-Notes' wallpaper designed by Walter

Crane, process half-tone engraving print, on paper, 1880-1914, E.4057-1915, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Fig. 3 Anon., ‘1 The Cock Green Woodpecker etc’, etching, published by William

Darton, 16 June 1820, Wellcome Library, London (Wellcome Images).

Fig. 4 Morris & Co, The Forest, tapestry, wool and silk on cotton warp, designed by

William Morris, Philip Webb and , woven at Abbey by

William Knight, John Martin and William Sleath, 1887, Victoria and Albert Museum,

London.

1 Morris’s first tapestry was Vine and Acanthus woven by him at House in 1879. The Woodpecker, wool and silk on cotton warp, 1885, produced by the tapestry workshop at Merton Abbey, now at William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow. See Oliver Fairclough and Emmeline Leary, by William Morris & Co. 1861-1940, Thames & Hudson, London, 1981, pp. 55-68; 106. 2 The pattern can be summarised IF-OF-IF-I and the topmost inward-facing honeysuckles seen as a terminating alternative to an infinitely repeatable IF-OF-IF-OF. 3 On this aspect of Victorian culture see Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localisation and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970, Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890, Oxford, Clarendon, 1998, Peter Allen Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art and Society in the Victorian Age, University of Wisconsin

Press, Madison, 1989 and Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850-1880, Oxford University Press, 2000. 4 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology (1855), 2 vols, second edition, Williams and Norgate, London 1870, vol. 1, p. 395. I draw from the second edition as the work revised following Darwin’s decisive intervention in the discussions over evolution. 5 Herbert Spencer, Ibid., p. 396. 6 Herbert Spencer, Ibid., p. 399. 7 Morris opposed the and the subscription to regulative functions of the state articulated by Spencer for instance in Spencer, First Principles, London, Williams and Norgate, 1862, p. 395, ‘Comparing the rule of a savage chief with that of a civilized government, aided by its subordinate local governments and their officers, down to the police in the streets, we see how, as men have advanced from tribes of tens to nations of millions, the regulative process has grown large in amount; how, guided by written laws, it has passed from vagueness and irregularity to comparative precision; and how it has sub-divided into processes increasingly multiform’. On Morris’s politics see E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 1955 and Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris, London, Faber & Faber, 1994. 8 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, (1855), 2 vols, second edition, Williams and Norgate, London 1870, vol. 1, p. 399.

9 Advertisement reproduction of the 'Wood-Notes' wallpaper designed by Walter Crane; Process half- tone engraving print, on paper. E.4057-1915, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

10 For instance William Morris, Bird and Anenome, printed textile, 1882, The Strawberry Thief, printed textile, 1883. 11 Edouard Traviès, Le Pic épeiche – Woodpecker, lithographed by the artist, plate 14 in E. Travies, Les oiseaux les plus remarquables par leurs formes et leurs coleurs. Scenes variees de leurs moeurs & de leur habitudes… , Gambart, Junin et Co., London and Paris, 1857. 12 This sound was embedded as a catchy tune in a song published by T. Broome of London settingthe words of the well-known ballad by Thomas Moore: ‘Ev’ry leaf was at rest, And I heard not a sound but the woodpecker tapping the hollow beech tree.’ The busy rhythm of the tapping is given in the piano accompaniment: semi quaver, then quaver, followed by four semi quavers. 13 Francis Darwin points out that the woodpecker was one of his father’s ‘stock examples’. Darwin, Francis ed. 1892. Charles Darwin: his life told in an autobiographical chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters [abridged edition]. London: John Murray, p. 304. Darwin references the woodpecker as he starts his investigation of orchids in 1860: ‘I have just recently been looking at the common Orchis, and I declare I think its adaptations in every part of the flower quite as beautiful and plain, or even more beautiful than in the Woodpecker.’ Darwin, Francis ed.. The life and letters of Charles Darwin, including an autobiographical chapter. vol. 3. London: John Murray 1887, vol. 3 p. 275, (letter of June 1860). 14 Charles Darwin, On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, London, John Murray, 1859, p. 3. 15 William Paley, Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (12th edition), London, J. Faulder, 1809. p. 250-251. 16 Darwin, Origin, ch II, ‘The Struggle for Survival’, p. 61. 17 Morris ‘The Lesser Arts of Life’ (1882), in Morris of Art and Design,, ed. Christine Poulson, Sheffield Academic Press, 1996, p. 82. 18 William Morris, ‘The lesser arts’, 1877, in Gillian Naylor ed, William Morris by Himself, (1988) TimeWarner, London, 2004, p. 147. 19 Darwin having established the wonder of functional adaptation in driving variation and ultimately the separation of species then commented further on the subsequent relocation and further variation of species. The woodpecker was one of his prime examples for this and one that attracted some controversy since his observations on the non-tree dwelling woodpecker of the South American plains were challenged. He maintained that here was a woodpecker with adapted feet for tree climbing that never climbed into trees. The adapted feature has become a species marker that persists when the species relocates to other habitats. 20 See George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the world, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996, ch. 6, Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin,

Natural Science and the Visual Arts, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge Fitzwilliam, Yale Center, New Haven, 2009. 21 It is described as an art that can be improved by practice and even pursued by the females, purely for pleasure, with the partial transference of the masculine characteristic. Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 54-5. 22 De Kay attributed its worldwide importance in mythology to the admiration that the ‘shiftless ... savage’ found for the neat and practical woodpecker: ‘...it can chisel for itself in a few hours a neat, dry cave in the bole of a tree – a bird ever brave and gay of heart that seems to find nourishment where no green thing grows, right under its busy beak’, Charles De Kay, Bird Gods, London and Cambridge, Mass., Harry R. Allenson, 1898, p. 27. It is an argument that William Morris would have had to present entirely differently (starting as he did from a sense of social human beings as intrinsically artistic, brave and industrious); recognition of a like being rather than admiration for an unlike being would fit Morris’s outlook better. 23 Darwin Descent of Man (1871) p. 62 ‘The diversity of the sounds, both vocal and instrumental, made by the males of many species during the breeding-season, and the diversity of the means for producing such sounds, are highly remarkable. We thus gain a high idea of their importance for sexual purposes, and are reminded of the same conclusion with respect to insects. [...]It is a curious fact that in the same class of animals, sounds so different as the drumming of the snipe's tail, the tapping of the woodpecker's beak, the harsh trumpet-like cry of certain water-fowl, the cooing of the turtle-dove, and the song of the nightingale, should all be pleasing to the females of the several species.’ Ibid., p. 67. 24 Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 66. 25 Charles De Kay, Bird Gods, London and Cambridge, Mass., Harry R. Allenson, 1898, p. 27. 26 Ibid., p. 30. 27 Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 56. 28 Darwin’s comments on the red head or throat of the woodpecker popping out from the nest in a hollow tree give us an example of his awareness of this. 29 Bruce Clarke, of Writing: the Subject of Metamorphosis, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1995, p. 32. 30 The reference here is to the net discussed by Gell: Alfred Gell, ‘Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps’, in The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, ed. E. Hirsch (London: Athlone Press, 1999), 187-214. 31 William Morris, ‘Mulberry Tree’, ‘Love's lack hath dyed my berries red: /For Love’s attire my leaves are shed.’ 32 William Morris, ‘Orange Tree’, ‘Amidst the greenness of my night /My odorous lamps hang round and bright.’ 33 William Morris, ‘The Flowering Orchard’ Silk Embroidery. ‘Lo silken my garden, and silken my sky./ And silken my apple-boughs hanging on high ; /All wrought by the Worm in the peasant carle's cot /On the Mulberry leafage when summer was hot !’ 34 Morris & Co., The Forest, tapestry, wool and silk on cotton warp, 1887 (with Philip Webb and J. H. Dearle), Victoria and Albert Museum. 35 Morris & Co., Pomona, tapestry, wool and silk on cotton warp, 1884-5 (, Whitworth Art Gallery) 36 William Morris, ‘Pomona’, ‘I am the ancient Apple-Queen,/ As once I was so am I now./ For evermore a hope unseen. /Betwixt the blossom and the bough. / /Ah, where's the river's hidden Gold ! / And where the windy grave of Troy ?/ Yet come I as I came of old. /From out the heart of Summer's joy.’