I. The First Revolt
WILLIAM MORRIS was born in March, 1834-ten years after the death of Byron, twelve years after Shelley’s death, thirteen years after the death of Keats. As he grew to adolescence, the reputation of the last two poets was growing up beside him. He was caught up in the last great eddies of that disturbance of the human spirit which these poets had voiced—the Romantic Revolt. Romanticism was bred into his bones, and formed his early consciousness. And some of the last clear notes of this passionate revolt were sounded when, in 1858, the young William Morris published The Defence of Guenevere:
“Poor merry Dinadan, that with jape and scoff
Kept us all merry, in a little wood
“Was found all hack’d and dead: Sir Lionel
And Gauwaine have come back from the great quest,
Just merely shamed; and Lauvaine, who loved well
Your father Launcelot, at the King’s behest
“Went out to seek him, but was almost slain,
Perhaps is dead now; everywhere
The knights come foil’d from the great quest, in vain,
In vain they struggle for the vision fair.”1
Thereafter the impulse of revolt in English poetry was almost spent, and the current set—in the poetry of Morris himself, as well as of Tennyson and their contemporaries—away from the main channels of life, and towards ever-more-secluded creeks and backwaters. What had once been a passionate protest against an intolerable social reality was to become little more than a yearning nostalgia or a sweet complaint. But, throughout all the years of his despair, between 1858 and 1878, the fire of Morris’s first revolt still burnt within him. The life of Victorian England was an intolerable life, and ought not to be borne by human beings. The values of industrial capitalism were vicious and beneath contempt, and made a mockery of the past history of mankind. It was this youthful protest, still burning within him, which brought him into contact, in 1882, with the first pioneers of Socialism in England. And when he found that these pioneers not only shared his hatred of modern civilization, but had an historical theory to explain its growth, and the will to change it to a new society, the old fire flared up afresh. Morris, the Romantic in revolt, became a realist and a revolutionary.
That is why a study of William Morris, the revolutionary, must start with some consideration of the Romantic revolt in poetry before his birth. But, first, let us summarize the main events of his first twenty-five years. Morris, in 1883 (the year in which he joined the Democratic Federation), described in a letter to the Austrian Socialist, Andreas Scheu, some of the events of his early life, as they appeared in importance from his new standpoint:
“I was born in Walthamstow… a surburban village on the edge of Epping Forest, and once a pleasant place enough, but now terribly cocknified and choked up by the jerry-builder.
“My Father was a business man in the city, and well-to-do; and we lived in the ordinary bourgeois style of comfort; and since we belonged to the evangelical section of the English Church I was brought up in what I should call rich establishmentarian puritanism; a religion which even as a boy I never took to.
“I went to school at Marlborough College, which was then a new and very rough school. As far as my school instruction went, I think I may fairly say I learned next to nothing there, for indeed next to nothing was taught; but the place is in very beautiful country, thickly scattered over with historical monuments, and I set myself eagerly to studying these and everything else that had any history in it, and so perhaps learned a good deal, especially as there was a good library at the school to which I sometimes had access. I should mention that ever since I could remember I was a great devourer of books. I don’t remember being taught to read, and by the time I was 7 years old I had read a very great many books good, bad and indifferent.
“My Father died in 1847 a few months before I went to Marlborough; but as he had engaged in a fortunate mining speculation before his death, we were left very well off, rich in fact.
“I went to Oxford in 1853 as a member of Exeter College; I took very ill to the studies of the place; but fell to very vigorously on history and especially medieval history, all the more perhaps because at this time I fell under the influence of the High Church or Puseyite school; this latter phase however did not last me long, as it was corrected by the books of John Ruskin which were at the time a sort of revelation to me; I was also a good deal influenced by the works of Charles Kingsley, and got into my head therefrom some socio-political ideas which would have developed probably but for the attractions of art and poetry. While I was still an undergraduate, I discovered that I could write poetry, much to my own amazement; and about that time being very intimate with other young men of enthusiastic ideas, we got up a monthly paper which lasted (to my cost) for a year; it was called the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, and was very young indeed. When I had gone through my school at Oxford, I who had been originally intended for the Church!!! made up my mind to take up art in some form, and so articled myself to G.E. Street… who was then practising in Oxford; I only stayed with him nine months however; when being … introduced by Burne-Jones, the painter, who was my great college friend, to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the leader of the Pre-Raphaelite School, I made up my mind to turn painter, and studied the art but in a very desultory way for some time…”1
Here, in Morris’s matter-of-fact narrative, the first great crisis of his life is described. The bill-broker’s son, shielded in a prosperous middle-class home, sent to receive the stamp of the ruling class at a public school (which was still too disorganised and new to do its corrupting job effectively),2 doomed to a clerical career—suddenly taking the decision to throw the respectabilities to the winds, to turn his back on the recognized professions and careers, and to cast in his lot with Rossetti’s circle of enthusiasts, Bohemians, and dedicated artists. It is true that the decision cost him no serious financial hardship. The toil, under appalling conditions, of the workers in the tin and copper mines of Devon and Cornwall shielded him from poverty, and gave him his freedom of choice—as he was later to understand only too well. But it was a real decision nonetheless. His whole life was to provide testimony that it was dictated by no mere whim or passing desire for amusement. Why did he take it? Why—when he had shown no particular aptitude in his youth—did he decide to dedicate his life to painting as an art?
II. History and Romance
It is easy enough to point to the leading passion of William Morris’s life at Marlborough and at Oxford. He himself described it often enough in later life. At one time he recalled his journeys to France in these years:
“Less than forty years ago I first saw the city of Rouen, then still in its outward aspect a piece of the Middle Ages: no words can tell you how its mingled beauty, history, and romance took hold on me; I can only say that, looking back on my past life, I find it was the greatest pleasure I have ever had…”1
Medievalism was not a new discovery in his adolescence. He had read Scott’s novels before he was seven: had ridden the glades of Epping Forest in a toy suit of armour. From his childhood his eye and visual memory were sharp for the architecture and art of the Middle Ages: and his games were those of knights, barons and fairies. His father took him on occasion to see the old churches in their neighbourhood, and once they visited Canterbury and the Church of Minster in Thanet: fifty years later—having never returned in the interval—he described the church from memory. In a lecture on The Lesser Arts of Life delivered in 1882, he recalled another early impression:
“How well I remember as a boy my first acquaintance with a room hung with faded greenery at Queen Elizabeth’s Lodge, by Chingford Hatch, in Epping Forest… and the impression of romance that it made upon me: a feeling that always comes back on me when I read, as I often do, Sir Walter Scott’s Antiquary, and come to the description of the green room at Monkbarns, amongst which the novelist has with such exquisite cunning of art imbedded the fresh and glittering verses of the summer poet Chaucer; yes, that was more than upholstery, believe me.”
At Marlborough he was rather solitary, and thought to be eccentric, spending much of his time taking rubbings of brasses, visiting historical sites, and still in his teens storing in his imagination “endless stories of knights and chivalry.”
But, for all this, he was not cut to the pattern of the romantic hero of late Victorian aestheticism—pale, nervous and sensitive, scorned and misunderstood by his fellows and the world. He was self-sufficient, it is true, and absorbed in a world of “romance”: but the world of “romance” was not incompatible with the closest observation and study wherever his interest directed him:
“On Monday I went to Silbury Hill which I think I have told you before is an artificial hill made by the Britons but first I went to a place called Avebury where there is a Druidical circle and a Roman entrenchment… T think the biggest stone I could see was about 16 feet out of the ground in height and about 10 feet thick and 12 feet broad, the circle and entrenchment altogether is about half a mile”,
he wrote in a letter from Marlborough to his sister. By the time he went up to Oxford he had assumed the forthright, assertive manner that springs to mind with the first mention of his name. His friend, Dixon (the same Canon Dixon with whom the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, was later to become intimate in correspondence) set down his memories of Morris at this time:
“At first Morris was regarded by the Pembroke men simply as a very pleasant boy… who was fond of talking, which he did in a husky shout, and fond of going down the river with Faulkner… He was also extremely fond of singlestick, and a good fencer. In no long time, however, the great characters of his nature began to impress us. His fire and impetuosity, great bodily strength, and high temper were soon manifested: and were sometimes astonishing. As… his habit of beating his own head, dealing himself vigorous blows, to take it out of himself … But his mental qualities, his intellect, also began to be perceived and acknowledged. I remember Faulkner remarking to me, ‘How Morris seems to know things, doesn’t he?’ And then it struck me that it was so. I observed how decisive he was: how accurate, without any effort or formality: what an extraordinary power of observation lay at the base of many of his casual or incidental remarks…”1
This accurate grasp of detail persisted in all his medieval studies, and not only in his chief interest, in architecture and the architectural arts. He fell enthusiastically upon the collection of illuminated manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and founded the store of knowledge which so astonished H.M. Hyndman, the Socialist leader, when, in the days of the Democratic Federation, they visited Oxford together, and the Curator at the Bodleian asked Morris to help in the identification of some recent acquisitions:
“Morris… taking them up one by one, looked, very quickly but very closely and carefully at each in turn, pushing it aside after inspection with ‘Monastery So and So, date Such and Such’, ‘Abbey this in such a year’, until he had finished the whole number; his decision being written down as he gave it. There seemed not to be the slightest doubt in the librarian’s mind that Morris’s judgment was correct and final, and though Morris hesitated here and there… eventually his verdict was given with the utmost certainty.”2
Amiens and Rouen: the grey, medieval streets of Oxford itself: illuminated manuscripts, brasses and carvings, already revealing their influence in the leaf patterns which he worked on the edges of his letters: the ballads, Chaucer, Froissart, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and all that was written of the Arthurian cycle—these were the things which quickened his pulse and roused him to heights of enthusiasm in his youth. This enthusiasm for medievalism coloured all his contributions to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, and culminated in his first great achievement, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems. It imparted that special flavour of idealized chivalric romance blended with closely-wrought detail which is distinctive of his early Story of the Unknown Church, and which is marked in such a passage as this, from his adolescent romance, A Dream:
“She saw him walking down toward the gateway tower, clad in his mail coat, with a bright, crestless helmet on his head, and his trenchant sword newly grinded, girt to his side; and she watched him going between the yew-trees, which began to throw shadows from the shining of the harvest moon. She stood there in the porch, and round by the corners of the eaves of it looked down toward her and the inside of the porch two serpent-dragons, carved in stone; and on their scales, and about their leering eyes, grew the yellow lichen; she shuddered as she saw them stare at her, and drew closer toward the half-open door; she, standing there, clothed in white from her throat till over her feet, altogether ungirdled; and her long yellow hair, without plait or band, fell down behind and lay along her shoulders, quietly, because the night was without wind…”
III. Mr. Gradgrind
A Dream was written when Morris was twenty-one: the year, 1855. On every side industrial capitalism was advancing triumphantly. The challenge of Chartism had receded. Four years before, the Great Exhibition of 1851 had ushered in twenty-five years of British industrial supremacy. The most humane and intelligent men and women of the middle class were concerned with the practical problems involved in clearing up the worst squalor and muddles left by the speculators of the previous decades: sewerage and paving, municipal government, the regulation of industrial conditions and the elimination of its worst abuses—these were among the concerns of enlightened minds. What did Sir Launcelot and maidens in white ungirdled drapery have to do with such a time?
The answer (or a part of it) is implicit in the question. In 1854, when Morris had just gone up to Oxford, Dickens published in Hard Times one of his most angry attacks upon Victorian utilitarianism:
“Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only found the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts…”
So Mr. Gradgrind orders the schoolmaster at the opening of the book. The scene of the action, Coketown, is dedicated to Fact:
“You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there… they made it a pious warehouse of red brick with sometimes (but this only in highly ornamented examples) a bell in a bird-cage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over’ the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The… school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.”
Dickens’s picture may be caricature: but it is of the best order of caricature, which delineates the essential lines of truth. Mr. Bounderby, the coarse and avaricious mill-owner of Hard Times, the type of the earlier Industrial Revolution, was now giving way to his more sophisticated cousin, Mr. Grad-grind. Gradgrind not only has power and wealth: he also has a theory to justify and perpetuate exploitation. The Victorian bourgeoisie had constructed from bits of Adam Smith and Ricardo, Bentham and Malthus a cast-iron theoretical system, which they were now securing with the authority of the State and the Law, and sanctifying with the blessings of Religion. The laws of supply and demand were “God’s laws,” and in all the major affairs of society all other values must bend before commodity values. Capital and labour were bound together by indissoluble ties: and upon the prosperity of capital depended the prosperity of the working class. Even excessive charity might endanger the working of these “natural” laws, by subsidizing and encouraging poverty, and (Dickens maintained) “the Westminster Review considered Scrooge’s presentation of the turkey to Bob Cratchit as grossly incompatible with political economy.” State regulation of the hours and conditions of adult labour (unless extended to “defenceless” children, or, in exceptional cases, the “weaker” sex) was not only bad political economy but a monstrous interference with God’s laws, which would bring down a terrible retribution. The market was the final determinant of value, and if there was insufficient demand to make fine architecture or beautifully planned towns pay, this was sufficient evidence that such commodities as these were insignificant in the realm of Fact.
Medievalism was one of the characteristic forms taken by the later flowering of the romantic movement in mid-nineteenth-century England. It was, in its essential impulse, a revolt against the world of the Railway Age, and the values of Gradgrind. It posed the existence, in the past, of a form of society whose values were finer and richer than those of profit and capitalist utility. Within this prevailing predisposition toward medieval themes and settings, some of the most significant conflicts of ideas of Morris’s time found their expression. From this same soil, from this same yearning for the ideal, the heroic and the passionate, in a world of Cash and Fact, grew both the Jesuit Hopkins and the pagan and Communist, William Morris. And behind both poets there may be sensed a more specific influence, in the achievement of the moodiest of all our great poets, John Keats.
IV. John Keats
We must look more closely at Keats than at any other forerunner of Morris, for his shadow falls most markedly upon Morris’s youth, and the evidence of his influence may be found in every page of The Defence of Guenevere. Within his work may be found the germ of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the deepening influence of medievalism, the first assertion of the theory of “art for art’s sake”. There is no wonder that Morris later recalled that “our clique was much influenced by Keats.”1
Keats was the contemporary and friend of Shelley. In Leigh Hunt’s circle he mixed with advanced Radicals and freethinkers. His private letters show that he was Radical himself in his sympathies, admired Orator Hunt, the chief speaker at Peterloo, and Richard Carlile, the courageous free-thinker, and shared Shelley’s revulsion at the oppressive corruption of his times. And yet (if his late poem, “The Cap and Bells”, be excepted) there is little evidence of direct political interest in his poetry. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”—none of these are made into themes for his great Odes.
Keats’s poetry is highly self-conscious, highly wrought and finished. He is less concerned than Shelley with the communication of an all-important message, more concerned with the craftsmanship of his art. His vocabulary differs, significantly, from that of his forerunners. Wordsworth’s employment of the “language of conversation of the middle and lower classes” is abandoned: we rarely meet the abstractions so frequent in Shelley. In their place we find the conscious employment of a “poetic” vocabulary, of words coloured by their historical (in particular, medieval) associations, but no longer in the general currency of speech. These facts, on their own, would suggest, that the mood of dejection, which is to be found in Shelley, had become, in Keats, overpowering, and that he had found in his poetry a refuge from a social reality which he felt to be unbearably hostile.
But this is only a part of the truth. The greater part can be found in that sense of conflict which may be found in all Keats’s poetry, from his early “Sleep and Poetry” to his final draft of “Hyperion”. This conflict sometimes appears as one between the sensuous and the philosophic life (“O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”), sometimes as between science and imagination (“Do not all charms fly/At the mere touch of cold philosophy?”): more often it is deeply embedded in the very structure of the poems themselves, in the acute tension between the richness of the life of the senses and imagination and the poverty of everyday experience, and in Keats’s struggle to reconcile the two. It is his intense awareness of this conflict (which was of central significance to English culture), which gives greatness to his achievement. The “Ode to a Nightingale” makes this plain.
The poem opens with the invocation of the mood of unconsciousness—“drowsy numbness”, “hemlock”, “opiate”, and “Lethe-wards”—and the nightingale’s song is shown as the external cause of the poet’s mood. The second verse intensifies the evocation of this mood, of the suspension of the active, conscious, suffering mind by the means of wine:
“That I might drink, and leave the world unseen
And with thee fade away into the forest dim…”
“Fade far away” is picked up in the third verse, and the world from which release is desired is defined. It is a world of “weariness”, “fever” and “fret”, “where men sit and hear each other groan”, a world of mortality and sickness, where beauty and love are transient, and “but to think is to be full of sorrow”. In the fourth verse, the list of those agents (hemlock, opiates, wine) which bring release from reality, is not only continued but is intensified by the invocation of “poesy” (and the choice of the archaic word is of significance):
“Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wing of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards…”
Poetry is now seen as the supreme means of escape to another world of art and imagination, where the active consciousness is numbed, and in the fifth verse Keats employs all his magnificent powers of sensual suggestion to evoke a blissful state on the very edge of the unconscious. The associations of “incense” and “embalmed” are realized in the next verse:
“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain…”
Drugs, wine, “poesy”—all have led to Death, the ultimate escape from reality. Now, with the real world exorcised, the other world of art and beauty becomes (as in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”) more real than life itself: and, in the seventh verse, this world is left in sole possession, the nightingale becomes all nightingales, a symbol of ideal beauty persisting unchanged throughout history, a part of a magic world:
“The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
But with “forlorn”, the sense of the poet’s alienation from the world of his everyday experience comes back to Keats—“the very word is like a bell/To toll me back from thee to my sole self!” The unreal world dissolves, the language becomes plain and everyday, the rhythm loses its drowsy incantation:
“Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream
Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades;
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?”
The real world has re-entered: but the question hangs in the air—which world is the real one?
The conviction of feeling in the poem is undeniable. Why should Keats have felt this conflict to be of so deep and poignant a nature? Some critics read the poem as simply an attempt to dispel the consciousness of death and of change by invoking a dream-world of art. But this does not fully explain the profound attraction for Keats of the suspension of the active consciousness. Why is it that reality should appear so unbearable to Keats that “poesy” should be allied with opiates and drugs as a means of escape? Why is it that the idea of consciousness is inseparable, for Keats, from the idea of suffering? Why is it that growing maturity and insight “into the heart and nature of Man” convinced him that the “world is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness, and oppression…”1 No explanation taken from his personal life is sufficient to account for this extreme polarization between the pleasures of sensation and imagination, and the pain of consciousness; nor to explain why despite his own political convictions, the great part of his best poetry is marked by an absence of warm or hopeful ambitions for mankind.
Now let us turn to one of Keats’s letters, written to his friend Bailey in November, 1817. His friend had sustained some insult at the hands of the Bishop of Lincoln, and the spontaneous incoherence of Keats’s rage reveals more of the very movement of his feelings than many of his more studied letters:
“It must be shocking to find in a sacred Profession such bare-faced oppression and impertinence—The Stations and Grandeurs of the World have taken it into their heads that they cannot commit themselves towards an inferior in rank… There is something so nauseous in self-willed yawning impudence in the shape of conscience—it sinks the Bishop of Lincoln into a smashed frog putrefying… Such is this World—and we live—you have surely in a continual struggle against the suffocation of accidents—we must bear (and my Spleen is mad at the thought thereof) the Proud Man’s Contumely. O for a recourse somewhat human independent of the great Consolations of Religion and undepraved Sensations—of the Beautiful—the poetical in all things—O for a Remedy against such wrongs within the pale of the World.”1
And so the invective continues, until it reaches a conclusion which takes us directly to the third verse of the “Ode to a Nightingale”—“The thought that we are mortal makes us groan”.
“You have one advantage which the young men of my time lacked”, William Morris wrote to the young Socialist, Fred Henderson, in 1885:
“We were borne into a dull time oppressed with bourgeoisdom and philistinism so sorely that we were forced to turn back on ourselves, and only in ourselves and the world of art and literature was there any hope. You on the contrary have found yourself confronted by the rising hope of the people…”2
These words might serve as a commentary on Keats’s life. The warm aspirations for Liberty, “suffocated” by his times and denied hope of realization, turned back upon their source. The imagination, he suggested in one letter, must either “deaden its delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable”, or “go mad after things that are not”. Faced by the “Proud Man’s Contumely”, Keats exalted the pride of his own creative genius. “Undepraved sensations… the Beautiful… the poetical in all things”—these at least were beyond the contamination of the “Stations and Grandeurs of the World”. The timeless world of art and literature provided a democracy of its own, open not to place-seekers and pensioners but to those with the inborn right of their own talent. “The Beautiful” is posed as a “Remedy” for the oppressions of the world: but, in the heat of Keats’s rage, it seemed to him an inadequate remedy, as he cried out for a recourse “somewhat human”, a remedy “within the pale of the World”. Almost without intending it, his letter reveals that the “world” of culture and imagination, and the “world” of his daily experience in society has become opposed to each other and distinct.
Keats was one of the first poets to feel in his own everyday experience the full shock of “bourgeoisdom and philistinism.” In his “Epistle to Reynolds” there is a passage where the “world” of dream and poesy breaks down sharply, and he writes:
“… I saw
Too far into the sea, where every maw
The greater on the less feed evermore.—
But I saw too distinct into the core
Of an eternal fierce destruction…
The Shark at savage prey,—the Hawk at pounce…”
“Big fish eat little fishes”—the image of the ethic at the heart of capitalism, of ruthless competition, self-interest, and struggle for survival, the same as used by Shakespeare in Timon. Keats was not screened by birth or wealth (as were Byron and Shelley) from the full impact of this competitive struggle. In the publication of his poetry, he found himself exposed on two fronts. On the one hand, much of the influence in the world of letters still rested with men who sought to continue the servile tradition of dependence upon aristocratic patronage, even after the substance had gone. When Keats and his friends (drawn mostly from the poorer professional classes) sought to claim a share in the cultural life of the nation, they were ridiculed as “Cockneys”. The very idea of a medical student or a schoolmaster writing poetry, independent of the patronizing encouragement of the Great, was laughable: and when the circle was found to be grouped around Leigh Hunt, a convicted Radical, it was dangerous! Blackwood’s, reviewing some of Keats’s poems, declared:
“The egotism of the Cockneys is… an inexplicable affair. None of them are men of genius… they are lecturers of the Surrey Institution, and editors of Sunday papers and so forth. They have all abundance of admirers in the same low order of society to which they themselves originally belong, and to which alone they have all their lives addressed themselves.1
On the other hand, Keats, no less than Shelley, found that the middle classes who were pressing forward the industrial revolution and who were soon to gain the day with the Reform Bill of 1832, had little time for poetry—a commodity which could not easily be measured by Mr. Gradgrind’s measuring-rod, and which “you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest”, unless it was concerned with hymning the virtues of those marketable assets, prudence, enterprise and thrift.
Already in Keats’s time the way was being prepared for the triumph in the mid-century of Victorian utilitarianism. Such perspectives filled Keats with no more enthusiasm than he felt for the decadent “Stations and Grandeurs of the World”. Under this strain, he revealed in his letters a morbid sensitivity to money relations and transactions. He found his poems on sale in the capitalist market, subject to the same laws of supply and demand as any commodity. The equation of human and artistic values to money values aroused his disgust, and revealed itself in a feeling of estrangement from his audience:
“A Preface is written to the Public; a thing I cannot help looking upon as an Enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of Hostility.”1
In reaction he turned his attention from the business of communication to the art product itself. If art-values were irrelevant to the market, they could only be realized through the integrity, the “self-concentration”, of the artist himself. He became the prototype of the “pure” artist, producing art for its own sake:
“I should say I value more the privilege of seeing things in loneliness than the fame of a prophet… I never expect to get anything by my Books: and moreover I wish to avoid publishing—I admire Human Nature but I do not like Men. I should like to compose things honourable to Man—but not flngerable over by Men.”2
This should not be seen as a desire on the part of Keats to escape from all social responsibilities. As he saw it, he was defending art itself in a world which had no place for it. “His nonsense… is quite gratuitous”, declaimed one supercilious reviewer: “He writes it for its own sake.”3 And the implication of this violent philis’tine attack was that poetry ought to be written to the greater glory of a society which Keats despised. At every turn Keats was racked by the conflict between the ideal and the real. Rather than hand over poetry to the utilitarians he was proud to write it for “its own sake”, and to nourish his aspirations for beauty and a nobler humanity in the loneliness” of his own heart. Even in his tormented personal relations with Fanny Brawne he sought to attach ideal attributes to her sadly at variance with the vapid society within which the real girl had her being. The same conflict was posed in “Lamia” in the opposition of the imaginative, sensuous, intuitive life, to the power of an analytical science which in his lifetime was carrying all before it. Even the “Eve of St. Agnes” is a supreme essay in illusion: an interval between storms, where the cold light of the moon is transformed by the coloured glass of windows against which the sharp sleet beats—the same image which Morris was to use with such effect in the final verses of his Apology to The Earthly Paradise.
This inward-turning of the great romantic impulse brought to Keats a heightened sensitivity to every shade of subjective experience, and in expressing the complexities of a vividly self-centred consciousness he anticipated new generations of writers (and of people) to come. But we are concerned here, not with an assessment of Keats but with the sources of that conflict which was to prove of such importance to Morris. For this conflict was not personal to Keats alone: it was central to the position of the artist in capitalist society. The terrible prophetic vision of Blake was becoming realized. All values were becoming, in Keats’s day, tainted with the property-values of the market, all life being bought and sold. The great aspirations at the source of the Romantic Revolt—for the freeing of mankind from a corrupt oppression, for the liberation of man’s senses, affections, and reason, for equality between men and between the sexes—were being destroyed by each new advance of industrial capitalism. But, with these aspirations (or the hope of their realization “within the pale of the World”) denied, this seemed to Keats to be an ugly, non-human, objectless world of oppression and pain, redeemed only by the pleasures of sensual experience, which themselves were evanescent and subject to mortality and change. On the other hand, the culture of the past, “the realms of gold”, in which finer values than those of Cash and Fact were enshrined, seemed saturated with a richness not to be found in life.
So it was that the words “Beauty” and “work of art” acquired a new meaning, which first crystallized in the writings of Keats, and which was accepted almost unreflectingly by the young Morris and Rossetti. “Beauty”, for Keats, was something “abstract”, not to be found in reality. It belonged especially to the world of artifice, art, imagination. Its source was in those aspirations within the artist’s heart, denied adequate expression in the realms of social existence and human action:
“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”1
It is not the objective world (we should note) but the “passions” of the artist which are the source of “Beauty”. These passions (unfulfilled in action) in the heart of the artist seemed to Keats to be the source, the inspiration, for the finished “work of art”. The work of art embodied these feelings in its unchanging, intrinsic beauty, and it could, in its turn, evoke these feelings, this sense of beauty, in the heart of the beholder. And so, between the heart of the artist and the work of art, the work of art and the audience, a self-enclosed aesthetic was fashioned, excluding the world of action and social reality. Art was no longer conceived, as by Shelley, as an agent in man’s struggle to master nature and discover himself. Art (if we set aside a lingering faith in its refining moral influence) was conceived as a compensation for the poverty of life.
Again and again, in the life of young Morris and Burne-Jones, in the Pre-Raphaelite circle and their friends, we shall meet with echoes of Keats’s life. Like Keats, they were (in the main) unorthodox and advanced in their opinions—freethinkers, or Republicans, or simply “Bohemians”; and, like Keats, their opinions found little expression in their art or their actions, they were without “hope” of their effective realization, they were “suffocated” and oppressed on all sides by “bourgeoisdom and philistinism”. When Morris became an active Socialist, it was this re-birth of “hope” to which he recurred, again and again, in lectures and poems. The heroes of his long Socialist poem he called “The Pilgrims of Hope”. Their “hope” was the vision of 1789, with a new brightness and certainty—“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”—reborn “within the pale of the world”.
But in Morris’s youth, the world of art and imagination was both a palace of refuge and a castle in revolt against the philistines. He turned to a dream-world more strange and fantastic than that of Keats. The continual conflict in Keats’s life, between rich aspiration and drab reality, could no longer be sustained with such intensity. Rather, the poetry of the mid-nineteenth century appears to oscillate between the two poles contained within Keats’s sensibility. On the one hand, the poetry of “realism” (at its worst, the poetry of Tupper) was soiled by the drab or brutal reality of life within industrial capitalism. It was impoverished and infected by philistine attitudes. Where it was not moralizing or sentimental, but was most sincere (as in some poems by Clough and Arnold) it was rarely far from disillusion or irony. And, alongside this, there was the poetry of “romance”—of medievalism, trance, and escape, filled with nostalgia and a yearning for values which capitalism had crushed, and which were projected into archaic or dream-like settings. The two kinds of poetry were not mutually exclusive. Tennyson, Arnold and Browning moved between them both. But neither kind of poetry rose to the sustained greatness of the earlier Romantics. The poetry of “romance”—as is emphasized by its special “poetic” attitudes and vocabulary—was always a little detached from the essential human conflicts of the time. But notwithstanding this, the love of art, the cherishing of aspirations threatened by philistinism, gave rise to poems of great poignancy and beauty. And it was to this poetry of “romance” that William Morris’s youthful contribution was made.
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1 “Sir Galahad, A Christmas Mystery.”
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1 Letters, pp. 184–6.
2 In an undated letter (1886 or 1887?) to the Reverend William Sharman, published in Labour Leader, April 18th, 1903, Morris again referred to his own education: “… my parents did as all right people do, shook off the responsibility of my education as soon as they could; handing me over first to nurses, then to grooms and gardeners, and then to a school—a boy farm, I should say. In one way or another I learned chiefly one thing from all these—rebellion.”
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1 “The Aims of Art”, Works, Vol. XXIII, p. 85.
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1 Mackail, I, p. 43.
2 H.M. Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (1911), p. 335.
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1 Works, Vol. XXII, p. xxxi: “Our clique was much influenced by Keats, who was a poet who represented semblances, as opposed to Shelley who had no eyes, and whose admiration was not critical but conventional.”
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1 Keats to Reynolds, May 3rd, 1818, Letters of John Keats (Ed. Buxton Forman, 4th Edition, 1952), pp. 142–3.
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1 Letters of John Keats, p. 59.
2 See first edition of this book, p. 878.
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1 Blackwood’s Magazine, April, 1819.
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1 Keats to Reynolds, April 9th, 1818, Letters of John Keats, op. cit, p. 129. “I have not the slightest feel of humility towards the public—or to anything in existence—but the eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty, and the Memory of great Men. When I am writing for myself for the mere sake of the moment’s enjoyment, perhaps nature has its’course with me—but a Preface,” etc.
2 Keats to Haydon, December 22nd, 1818, Ibid., p. 271. 3
3 Quarterly Review, April, 1818.
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1 Keats to Bailey, November 22nd, 1817, Letters of John Keats, op. cit, p. 67.