I. Architecture, Machinery and Socialism
WILLIAM MORRIS’S theoretical insights as to the relations between art and labour are revealed in the course of historical and descriptive exposition, rather than schematically in any single book; and they must be reconstructed from many scattered references. We have already seen how profoundly Morris was influenced as a young man by John Ruskin’s “The Nature of Gothic”, and how he was later forced to develop Ruskin’s theories to justify his own actions in the early years of the Anti-Scrape. These theories were brought to their conclusion in 1883 or 1884, after his reading of Capital and his active participation in the Socialist movement, and—in the several dozen lectures and articles written from that time to his death—he altered them in no important principle.
These theories were developed, from origin to conclusion, in relation to the architectural and associated arts (among which Morris sometimes included the art of printing, as well as the lesser decorative arts), and Morris scarcely attempted to apply them in detail to the “intellectual” arts. Morris himself was often at pains to make this distinction. “Art” meant, to him, the visual arts, and the popular arts “might all be summed up in that one word Architecture”:
“They are all parts of that great whole, and the art of house-building begins it all: if we did not know how to dye or to weave; if we had neither gold, nor silver, nor silk; and no pigments to paint with… we might yet frame a worthy art that would lead to everything, if we had but timber, stone, and lime, and a few cutting tools to make these common things not only shelter us from wind and weather, but also express the thoughts and aspirations that stir in us. Architecture would lead us to all the arts…”1
In a more general sense, he distinguished the Intellectual and the Decorative arts: the first “addresses itself wholly to our mental needs”, the second is always “but a part of things which are intended primarily for the service of the body”:
“In all times when the arts were in a healthy condition there was an intimate connexion between the two kinds of art… The highest intellectual art was meant to please the eye… as well as to excite the emotions and train the intellect. It appealed to all men, and to all the faculties of a man. On the other hand, the humblest of the ornamental art shared in the meaning and emotion of the intellectual… the best artist was a workman still, the humblest workman was an artist. This is not the case now—”
and the sharp division between the professional “artist” and the wage-earning workman was one of the sources of his ever-welling indignation against industrial capitalism.1
His theory of the architectural arts was firmly based upon those sections of “The Nature of Gothic” which described the relationship of the medieval craftsman to his society and to the tradition. “A man at work”, wrote Morris—
“making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works. Not only his own thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his hands; and, as a part of the human race, he creates. If we work thus we shall be men, and our days will be happy and eventful.”2
Not only does he create “as a part of the human race”, but as a member of a definite society, with its own local traditions, its own conditions of labour and social commands; and we have seen how Morris, in successive lectures to the Anti-Scrape, examined these conditions in medieval society, and the gradual destruction of the creative initiative of the craftsman in the architectural arts, first in the profit-making workshop, second in developed industrial capitalism. It must be emphasized (since Morris’s own repeated emphasis has been ignored or misunderstood by so many commentators) that he did not indict industrialism as such for degrading the craftsman to a machine, but capitalism, the production of goods primarily for profit and not for use. Indeed, in more than one lecture he referred to the eighteenth-century workshop system as being a blacker and more degrading period for the workman than the factory system of the nineteenth-century which at least provided the possibility of the lightening of toil which production for profit, specialization and repetition-work had already rendered hateful and mechanical.
Although based in the first place upon Ruskin, it is untrue to suggest (as a critic does) that Morris’s views are in the main “the orthodox Ruskinian view of the history of architecture”, reiterated without significant development.1 Rather, we have in the best of these articles and lectures a fusion of Ruskin’s finest moments of moral-artistic insight, of Morris’s lifetime of historical study, and of the economic and social analysis of Marx. Where Ruskin had jabbed an indignant finger at capitalism and had often (guided by Carlyle’s wrath at the “cash-nexus”) indicated, in the worship of Mammon, the source of its degradation and horror, Morris was able in page after page of coherent and detailed historical exposition to reveal in the very processes of production, the common economic root both of capitalist exploitation and of the corruption of art.
Morris knew perfectly well that there had been exploitation of a vicious kind in feudal, as well as in capitalist society. Therefore, he was at pains to explain (with great attention to the details of the productive process) how it was that feudal society was compatible with the “freedom” of the craftsman as craftsman, and with the flourishing of the architectural arts. “The ancient buildings of the Middle Ages”, he wrote many times, were “the work of the associated labour and thought of the people, the result of a chain of tradition unbroken from the earliest ages”.1 “There is not an ancient city in the East or West”, he declared:
“that does not bear some token of their grief, and joy, and hope. From Ispahan to Northumberland, there is no building built between the seventh and seventeenth centuries that does not show the influence of the labour of that oppressed and neglected herd of men. No one of them, indeed, rose high above his fellows. There was no Plato, or Shakespeare, or Michael Angelo amongst them. Yet scattered as it was among many men, how strong their thought was, how long it abided, how far it travelled!”2
The State, then as now, was based on robbery, which “was carried out quite crudely, without any concealment or excuse, by arbitrary taxation or open violence”.3 On the other hand, he suggested, the medieval craftsmen—
“worked shorter hours than we do… and had more holidays. They worked deliberately and thoughtfully as all artists do… the unspoiled country came up to their very doors… All their work depended on their own skill of hand and invention, and never failed to show signs of that in its beauty and fitness.”4
Like Carlyle he stressed that feudal bonds were “theoretically at least, personal rights and personal duties” and not the impersonal bonds of the commercial market. More of the cooperative ethic was to be found in feudal society than in capitalist, and (again in theory) usury, forestalling, and re-grating were offences against the law.5
Under such conditions the labour of the mason, weaver and smith was a source of interest and pleasure to himself, and the product of his labour was fitting and beautiful. With capitalist production,
“the creation of surplus value being the one aim of the employers of labour, they cannot for a moment trouble themselves as to whether the work which creates the surplus value is pleasurable to the worker or not. In fact in order to get the greatest amount possible of surplus value out of the work… it is absolutely necessary that it should be done under such conditions as make… a mere burden which nobody would endure unless upon compulsion.’’1
The system of wage-slavery, crowned by the industrial revolution, destroyed both the attractiveness of labour for the craftsman and the beauty of the product,
“by lengthening the hours of labour: by intensifying the labour during its continuance; by the forcing of the workmen into noisy, dirty crowded factories; by the aggregation of the population into cities and manufacturing districts… by the levelling of all intelligence and excellence of workmanship by means of machinery… All this is the exact contrary of the conditions under which the spontaneous art of past ages was produced.”2
Nevertheless, by destroying the attractiveness of labour, capitalism lays on the backs of the workers one more burden too intolerable to be borne. It was necessary that the medieval craftsmen, struggling against their oppressors, “should struggle upwards till they formed a middle-class and created commerce with its proletariat doomed to ceaseless unattractive dull labour… Nevertheless, it is that proletariat only that can make good the claim of workmen to their share of art, without which no art can live long.” “The price which commercialism will have to pay for depriving the worker of his share of art will be its own death.”3
Upon this central historical argument, developed with a wealth of illustration, there hung a hundred further lines of thought. The Renaissance appeared to Morris as the watershed: being at one and the same time the period of the flowering of individual genius from the traditions of the past, and the beginning of the degeneration of that tradition in the architectural arts, and of the division between the workman and the professional artist, the article of use and the “work of art”.1 Fundamental to his outlook, was his view that “neutrality is impossible in man’s handiwork”: a product must either be actively beautiful or actively ugly; “a house, a knife, a cup, a steam engine… anything that is made by man and has form, must either be a work of art or destructive to art”.2 He hated the “utilitarian” economy, not because its products were useful, but because “the word instead expresses… a quality pretty nearly the opposite of useful, and means something which is useful for nothing save squeezing money out of other people’s necessities”.3 The “utilitarian” he saw, in capitalist society, as always the ally of “makeshift”-the production of shoddy, substitute, ersatz; and also of the useless and debased “luxury” articles, stimulated by advertising and an artificially fostered demand. The vast majority of the products of modern industry he placed within one or the other category, with the exception of the machines (“for the making of makeshifts”) and “instruments made for the destruction of wealth and the slaughter of man, on which indeed wonderful ingenuity almost amounting to genius is expended”.4
For Morris, who found both his rest and his satisfaction in his own work, the reduction of labour by capitalism to hateful drudgery appeared as a culminating horror. From Daniel Defoe he borrowed a quotation which he prefixed to one of his lectures:
“And the men of labour spent their strength in daily struggling for bread to maintain the vital strength they labour with: so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of a wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.”
He broke sharply with Carlyle’s doctrine that “all labour is noble”. “It has become an article of the creed of modern morality”, he wrote, “that all labour is good in itself—a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others.”1 “If I were to work ten hours a day at work I despised and hated, I should spend my leisure I hope in political agitation, but I fear—in drinking.”2 From his study of the architectural arts in the Middle Ages he drew his most famous “precepts”. First, “Art is Man’s expression of his joy in labour”.3 Second, “Nothing should be made by man’s labour which is not worth making, or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers”.4 Third, that the only healthy art is “an art which is to be made by the people and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user”.5 “I have looked at this claim by the light of history, and my own conscience”, he declared in one of his best-known passages—
“and it seems to me… a most just claim, and that resistance to it means nothing short of the denial of the hope of civilization. This then is the claim: It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do which shall be worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to do; and which should be done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious. Turn that claim about as I may… I cannot find that it is an exorbitant claim; yet… if Society would or could admit it, the face of the world would be changed.”6
But such a claim, as Morris had discovered several years before he read Marx, was revolutionary: it could not be granted by capitalism. However high-sounding the appeals to “progress” and ihe “public welfare”, Morris detected under each fresh advance of industrial capitalism one sole motive—the extraction of fresh profit, with the accompanying destruction of the beauty of nature and the treasures of the past. “No man of sense and feeling”, he wrote, “would dare to regret such losses if they had been paid for by new life, and happiness for the people. But there is the people still as it was before, still facing for its part the monster who destroyed all that beauty, and whose name is Commercial Profit”.1 Opposing the railway to the Lake District, he said “as things go now… [it] is not a question of the convenience of the Amblesiders, or the pleasure of the world in general, but the profit of a knot of persons leagued together against the public… under the name of a railway company”.2 The slums of Glasgow he described as “a most woeful abode of man, crying out from each miserable court and squalid, crowded house for the abolition of the tyranny of exploitation”.3 So long as the search for profit dominated economic life, so long would that beauty be desecrated which Morris regarded as one of the sources of artistic inspiration:
“Until the contrast is less disgraceful between the fields where beasts live and the streets where men live, I suppose that the practice of the arts must be mainly kept in the hands of a few highly cultivated men…”4
It might be possible to alleviate the present, to “make the best of it”, to restrain and check the ravages of commercialism. A public demand for simple and solid craftsmanship might be fostered even within capitalist society, according to his often-repeated precept: “Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”5 But the tendency of modern commercialism would persist: to make, on the one hand, self-conscious objects of ornament for display and, on the other hand, to confine those articles of genuine fitness and beauty, produced more by accident than design, to the kitchen. The claim, when phrased in positive terms—
“Every man willing to work should be ensured: First, Honourable and fitting work; Second, A healthy and beautiful house; Third, Full leisure for rest of mind and body,”1
could only be achieved in a Socialist society.
There is a very widespread opinion, both among those who approve and those who oppose Morris’s views, that he was an uncompromising enemy of all machinery as such, and that his chief motive in becoming a Socialist lay in an Utopian desire to return to a society of handicraftsmen—a feudal society, with social equality somehow replacing the feudal hierarchy of class. This view has been fostered in many minds by a reading of News from Nowhere unrelated to the conditions of its creation and to the specific statements on this issue in Morris’s other writings.
In fact, Morris makes his views on this matter perfectly clear in his lectures. Capitalism, not machinery, has reduced the workman to “an appendage of profit-grinding”, reducing the mill-hand, for example, to being “as much a part of the factory where he works as any cog-wheel or piece of shafting is”. The horror, for Morris, was not in the factory system itself, but in its subjugation to profit-grinding in its working conditions and social organization. “The socialization of labour which ought to have been a blessing to the community has been turned into a curse by the appropriation of the products of its labours by individuals.”2 “Our epoch”, he said, “has invented machines which would have appeared wild dreams to the men of past ages, and of those machines we have as yet made no use” The real human use to which machines ought to be put is in the saving of labour: capitalism uses them “to reduce the skilled labourer to the ranks of the unskilled… to intensify the labour of those who serve the machines”, and to create a growing army of unemployed.1
With Socialism the role of machinery is transformed:
“The manufacture of useless goods, whether harmful luxuries for the rich or disgraceful makeshifts for the poor, having come to an end, [we shall still be] in possession of the machines once used for mere profit-grinding but now used for saving human labour.”2
“In short, we should be the masters of our machines and not their slaves”:
“It is not this or that tangible steel and brass machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny which oppresses the lives of all of us.”3
Not only will machinery be useful in alleviating those forms of heavy and unattractive labour (such as coal-mining) to which (at the time Morris was writing) it had scarcely been seriously applied, on the grounds that it did not “pay”: but it will also prove to be the essential instrument for the realization of the new society. In Morris’s words, it will,
“when the worker-class, the proletariat, is full grown be the instrument which will make socialism possible by making possible the equalisation of labour as applied to the necessities of life, and will thereby leave open to men the higher field of intellectual effort.”4
When we are equal, he wrote in one of his last articles, “there will be no fear then of our doing nothing but dry utilitarian work”:
“Have we not our wonderful machines to do that for us?… What are the said machines about now that the mass of the people should toil and toil without pleasure? They are making profits for their owners, and have no time to save the people from drudgery. When the people are their owners—then we shall see.”1
Not only would the role of machinery be transformed in Socialist society, but the factory itself:
“This very factory system, under a reasonable order of things (though to my mind there might still be drawbacks to it), would at least offer opportunities for a full and eager social life surrounded by many pleasures.”
The factory would be a “centre of intellectual activity”,2 and,
“besides turning out goods useful to the community, will provide for its own workers work light in duration, and not oppressive in kind, education in childhood and youth, serious occupation, amusing relaxation… leisure… beauty of surroundings, and the power of producing beauty which are sure to be claimed by those who have leisure, education and serious occupation.”3
On the other hand, “it may be allowable for an artist, that is one whose ordinary work is pleasant and not slavish, to hope that in no factory will all the work… be mere machine-tending”.4 There must be variety of labour as well as leisure:
“If the work be specially rough and exhausting… I must take turns in doing it with other people; I mean I mustn’t, for instance, be expected to spend all my working hours always at the bottom of a coal-pit.”5
Even repetitive labour would be “made attractive by the consciousness of usefulness”:
“It is most certain that labour may be so arranged that no social relations could be more delightful than communion in hopeful work; love, friendship, family affection, might all be quickened by it; joy increased, and grief lightened by it.”1
But the arduous or boring character of the labour should be borne in mind in assessing the social value of the product: and if the product was inessential and the cost in wearisome labour high, then society would have to do without it. The doing away of “all antagonism between town and country” Morris thought a necessary consequence of Socialism, though the actual way in which this would happen would rest with the future.2 The factory itself, surrounded by gardens and of pleasant and fitting architecture, would provide facilities not only for technical and liberal education, but for the pursuit of music, drama, and the fine arts. With the death of competition, “no new process, no details of improvements in machinery, would be hidden from the first enquirer”; and the high technical knowledge of the workers “would foster a general interest in work and in the realities of life, which would surely tend to elevate labour and create a standard of excellence in manufacture”.3 Finally, it went without saying that a Socialist society would employ its scientific genius in finding means of eliminating smoke and filth, in disposing of rubbish and waste, and in preventing industry from blackening and despoiling the countryside.
This, then, is an exact statement of the position as Morris saw it when he set forward the matter carefully in his political lectures. But he made no bones about the fact that by temperament he had a strong dislike to all machinery, except those primitive kinds which could not perform their work unless the craftsman’s “hand was thinking”. The intricacies of machinery, the great constructional achievements of the nineteenth century, evoked little response in him; he was not excited by a sense of power or wonder at their potentialities. That this was, in part, a matter of his own background and temperament he recognized.1 In part, the source of his objection was more profound. As he once declared, “I believe machines can do everything—except make works of art”.2 This reservation he always kept to the fore:
“I believe that the ideal of the future does not point to the lessening of men’s energy by the reduction of labour to a minimum, but rather to the reduction of pain in labour to a minimum.”3
He thought it likely that in the transitional stage of Socialism machinery would be greatly developed; “the reflex of the terror of starvation, which so oppresses us now, would drive us into excesses of utilitarianism.”4
“For the consolation of artists I will say that I believe indeed that a state of social order would probably lead at first to a great development of machinery for really useful purposes… but after a while [people] will find that there is not so much work to do as they expected, and then they will have leisure to reconsider the whole subject; and if it seems to them that a certain industry would be carried on more pleasantly as regards the worker, and more effectually as regards the goods, by using hand-work rather than machinery, they will certainly get rid of their machinery, because it will be possible for them to do so.”5
In sum, when men have mastered their material needs, “they will doubtless turn themselves and begin to find out what it is they really want to do”.1
Morris never posed this question as one of practical theoretical importance. He knew perfectly well that:
“We cannot turn our people back into Catholic English peasants and Guild craftsmen, or into heathen Norse bonders, much as may be said for such conditions of life.”2
He saw the matter as a choice to be made after the transitional stage of Socialism, when men might either work greatly reduced hours with improved machinery and satisfy their creative faculties in their leisure;3 or might decide to return to handcrafts in certain fields—textiles, pottery, metal-work, and possibly agriculture4 —for the pleasure of creating art in their daily labour. When that choice came (as it had already come in News from Nowhere) he hoped that men would choose “to keep life simple, to forgo some of the power over nature won by past ages in order to be more human and less mechanical, and willing to sacrifice something to this end.”5 Machinery would then be used “for the prevention of drudgery and not otherwise”.6 In no case would it altogether disappear. One is reminded of Shaw’s story of accompanying Morris through the Merton Abbey works. Directing attention to a dull and mechanical task he “dared to say”: “You should get a machine to do that.” “I’ve ordered one”, was Morris’s reply.7
So far we have been concerned with Morris’s theories as they relate to the practice of the architectural and allied arts, and the labour of the workman. Before leaving these theories, we must enquire how far Morris fashioned a coherent aesthetic—a theory of the nature of art and of its value among other human activities. Moreover, we have still to examine his attitude to the “intellectual” arts and to the creative problems of the individual artist.
Morris found it difficult to ask himself seriously the question, “Does art have any value?” His own pleasure in creative work was so intense that he found it difficult to conceive of anyone without an artistic sense. It was, to him, like eyesight, hearing, touch; and the deprivation of thousands of workers of the full development of this sense filled him with rage.1 Nevertheless, the question was forced upon him, and he attempted to answer it, by describing his own feelings, and by interpreting the past.
On the one hand, there was the Ruskinian formula, “Art is the expression of man’s joy in labour”. Viewed from this aspect (the satisfaction of the artist or craftsman) Morris regarded art (but the lesser decorative arts in particular) as the pleasurable exercise of physical, intellectual and emotional faculties. He drew a parallel directly from nature:
“The horse in his natural state delights in running, and the dog in hunting, while in the elementary conditions of savage human life, certain ceremonies, and adornments of weapons… point to a sense of pleasure and dignity even in the process of the acquisition of food… It was from this turning of a necessary work into amusement that definite art was finally born.”2
As “Barbarism began to give place to early Civilization, this solace of labour fell asunder into duality… and art became incidental and accessory on the one side and independent and primary on the other”.1 Nevertheless, the relationship between the two kinds of art will always persist, and neither can be sick for long without affecting the health of the other.
On the other hand, Morris viewed art from a different aspect. On several occasions he described the “Reverence for the Life of Man… [as] the foundation of all art”. On another,
“Art is man’s embodied expression of interest in the life of man; it springs from man’s pleasure in his life; pleasure we must call it, taking all human life together, however much it may be broken by the grief and trouble of individuals…”2
Again, he speaks of “the sense of beauty in the external world, of interest in the life of man as a drama, and the desire of communicating this… to our fellows” as “an essential part of the humanity of man”.3 The arts “are man’s expression of the value of life, and also the production of them makes his life of value”.4 “Eager life while we live… is above all things the Aim of Art”, he wrote in another place.5 It was implicit in his view that the arts had an enobling influence, a potent moral influence:
“Stories that tell of men’s aspirations for more than material life can give them, their struggles for the future welfare of their race, their unselfish love, their unrequited service: things like this are the subjects for the best art…”6
And he declared:
“I will say, without pretending to give a definition, that what I mean by an art is some creation of man which appeals to his emotions and his intellect by means of his senses. All the greater arts appeal directly to that intricate combination of intuitive perceptions, feelings, experience, and memory which is called imagination. All artists… have these qualities superabundantly, and have them balanced in such exquisite order that they use them for purposes of creation.”1
This is a description rather than a definition, although the terms used to describe imagination show that Morris was aware of the complexity of the artistic process. It is true,.and in a profound sense, that “all worthy schools of art… [are] the outcome of the aspirations of the people towards the beauty and true pleasure of life.”2 But such words as “beauty”, “pleasure”, and “aspiration” are signposts only to further assumptions which Morris never discussed.
Morris leant too heavily upon arguments derived from the decorative arts when dealing with art as a whole. He knew little or nothing about recent discoveries as to the active social agency of certain arts in the life of primitive peoples: the carving on the bone handle of a knife cannot explain to us the function and meaning of the ritual dance. Moreover, in the second part of his descriptive definition, he erred by divorcing art from the historical process as a whole. One might be tempted to exclaim: “Art would have been this had it not been for class society, art will b% this with the abolition of classes.” But Morris has not emphasized sufficiently the ideological role of art, its active agency in changing human beings, its agency in man’s class-divided history. It is true that these considerations are never absent when Morris treats the history of architecture or pattern-designing in detail. But in the “intellectual” arts he did not see the matter so clearly.
It is perhaps too extreme a judgement to say (as one sympathetic critic has said) that Morris’s aesthetics “were of the standard Pre-Raphaelite brand”. It is difficult to point to any such “standard brand”, and Morris, with his great historical understanding, could not be confined within it. But several of his favourite terms—and, in particular, “beauty” and “pleasure”—carry the associations gained in Morris’s early romantic revolt. In this area of artistic theory the illusions of his youth clung most closely and were the hardest to shake off. His view of “beauty” was coloured to the end by the romantic search for the “ideal”: art must be either epic or heroic, or “beautiful” in the sense of sweet, easeful, decorative, soothing. He stoutly maintained the view that it was impossible for the painter to create this “beauty” without beautiful models in the life and society around him,1 and therefore—
“those only among our painters do work worth considering, whose minds have managed to leap back across the intervening years, across the waste of gathering commercialism, into the later Middle Ages… Anyone who wants beauty to be produced at the present day in any branch of the fine arts, I care not what, must be always crying out ‘Look back! look back!’ “2
This was in part a reflection of his own practice in the arts. The Earthly Paradise, Love Is Enough, even Sigurd the Volsung, show little of that imaginative and intellectual contest with reality which marks the greatest creative achievement. “Pleasure”—the word Morris had borrowed from Ruskin—was a deceptive doctrine, especially when applied to the “intellectual” arts. He carried the analogy between the pleasing exercise of the craftsman’s energies further than can be justified. While he shook off the romantic concept of “inspiration”, he tended to assume that all worth-while art had an easy and almost spontaneous birth, whatever problems of execution might later intervene.
Some illustration of his attitude may be found in his own literary and artistic taste. Here he maintained a strong predisposition towards late medieval art on the one hand, and saga and epic on the other. He could never forget that the Renaissance was the time “when Europe first opened its mouth wide to fill its belly with the east winds of commercialism”.1 “The great men who lived and glorified the practice of art in those days were the fruit of the old, not the seed of the new order of things”, he declared,2 thereby denying by implication that bourgeois individualism made any addition to man’s consciousness. Because the Renaissance marked in his view the beginning of the degeneration of the architectural arts, he attempted to fit the “intellectual” arts into the same pattern of interpretation. The literature of the eighteenth century, he held, “lacks all imaginative qualities”, and its painting reveals little but “cleverness, readiness and confidence”, while its verses which “insult the name of poetry” were filled with a “hatred of imagination and humanity”.3 Always he returned with relief to the architecture and art of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: “the loveliest, brightest, and gayest of all the creations of the human mind and hand”.4
Although Morris made token references to the great artists and writers of the past four hundred years, his references were without warmth. “Shakespeare”, Shaw remarks, “was not in the Morris movement, which was strongly anti-rhetorical.”5 When he was invited, in 1885, to set down his “Best Hundred Books”, he selected fifty-four: the first thirty-seven were made up of ancient and traditional writing, the sagas, and a few classical and medieval works; in the remaining seventeen he included six English poets—Shakespeare, Blake (“the part of him which a mortal can understand”), Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron; seven novelists—Bunyan, Defoe, Scott, Dumas, Victor Hugo, Dickens and George Borrow—and the works of Ruskin and Carlyle. The omissions are significant—Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Milton (“the union in his works of cold classicism with Puritanism (the two things which I hate most in the world) repels me so that I cannot read him”), the eighteenth-century novelists, Wordsworth (whom, Shaw says, he hated for his piety), let alone the major European novelists and poets.1 He was aware of the greatness of Balzac and Tolstoy, but he seems to have read them with difficulty—even distaste. He was moved to fury by the attempt to ban Zola for “obscenity”: Germinal he thought to be “part of a true picture of the life which our civilization forces on labouring men”, but he clearly did not regard this as a fit subject for “art”.2 He praised Ibsen’s Doll’s House as “a piece of the truth about modern society clearly and forcibly put”, and jeered at the horror of “the respectable critics”:3 indeed, he found in Ibsen “another token of the new dawn”. But, for all that, it is clear that he felt little real enthusiasm. Henry James, like Meredith, aroused in him little but impatience: he was “the clever historian of the deadliest corruption of society, the laureat of the flirts, sneaks, and empty fools of which that society is mostly composed, and into whose hearts (?) he can see so clearly”.4 He accused him of total insensitivity to the people: he looked on the “working-classes as an useful machine”, and “has not imagination enough to realize the fact that the said machine is composed of millions of men, women, and children who are living in misery”. The impressionists Morris considered to be openly at enmity with beauty, and “drifting into the domain of empirical science”: nevertheless, he recognized their honesty and eagerness of purpose—“the public would be quite wrong in supposing them to be swayed by mere affectation”.5 In sum, he was out of sympathy with many of those trends in the arts in his own time which now command our attention or respect.
Morris tried his hand at formal literary criticism only once or twice in his life, and it must be counted a misfortune that he did not make more effort to order and discipline his responses than he did. He recognized this weakness in himself, and expressed it in 1877, when refusing nomination to the Chair of Poetry at Oxford University.
“It seems to me that the practice of any art rather narrows the artist in regard to the theory of it; and I think I come more than most men under this condemnation… I have a peculiar inaptitude for expressing myself except in the one way that my gift lies. Also… I have a lurking doubt as to whether the Chair of Poetry is more than an ornamental one, and whether the Professor of a wholly incommunicable art is not rather in a false position…”1
As Morris stressed, “I never set up for a critic”. His feeling that art should be a “solace”, an expression of “pleasure”, led him to underestimating the agency of art in history. This was paralleled in his responses by a lack of enthusiasm for the painful, the tragic (unless in terms of epic and saga), and a definite dislike of introspective and subjective art.2 This does not mean that he evaded suffering in his life: his actions must disprove this. But he did avoid the contemplation of suffering in art: he had a surfeit of it in his daily experience, and he tended to turn to art for repose or even for escape. It would be after some painful experience, some sordid exposure in the law courts during the propaganda, that (Shaw relates) Morris would return home and lose himself in the pages of Dumas or Dickens or Huckleberry Finn.3 In general, Morris was blind towards the great achievements of bourgeois realism. He knew these works existed, he recognized that they were great, but they moved no enthusiasm in him: and this blind-spot robs his general theory of the arts of some of its value.
An interesting parallel can be seen between Morris’s weaknesses in political theory in the 1880s, and his blind-spots in the appreciation and understanding of the arts. Both sprang from the very vehemence of his revolt against capitalist society, his utter disgust at the values of his own class. The “hatred of modern civilization” which had been part of his early Pre-Raphaelite revolt had impelled him on his way to Socialism, and saved him from becoming enmeshed in many illusions from which other sincere artists of his time could not escape. On the other hand, it imbued him with a hostility to the individualist ethic of capitalist society which appears to have deadened in him all positive response to many great artistic achievements in the previous three hundred years.
This blindness was not only loss. It fostered in him an acute response to those periods of history when the people participated most in the practice of the arts. Moreover, it helped him to view the problem of the relation of the artist to his society from a social, rather than an individualist, standpoint. It is here that some of his most telling judgements on the arts were made. Repeatedly he declared that art could not thrive in the hands of a few highly-cultivated men within an utilitarian and hostile society. Rather—
“it will be always but the blossom of all the half-conscious work… below it, the fulfilment of the shortcomings of less complete minds… it will waste much of its power, and have much less influence on men’s minds, unless it be surrounded by abundance of that commoner work, in which all men once shared.”1
The divorce of the artist from “the general sympathy of simple people weighs very heavily on him, and makes his work feverish and dreamy, or crabbed and perverse”.1 The argument that Socialism should be opposed because it would not encourage genius received from him short shrift:
“Do you think, as some do, that it is not ill that a hundred thousand harmless people should be boiled down on the fire of misery to make one single glorious great man? I honestly believe that there are people who are fools enough to think that. I answer plainly, great men are nourished on no such soup, though prigs may be; it is the happiness of the people that produces the blossom of genius. But even if it were so I… would rather have a hundred thousand happy persons than one genius made up of murder.”2
The relation between the artist, or the craftsman, and his society was the theme of many lectures. He looked upon the history of the arts, not—as did many of his contemporaries—as the record of individual geniuses, each “inspired” and each influencing each other, but as part of wider social processes. In his first lecture (in 1877) he described the development of the arts as a natural process: “Like all growth, it was good and fruitful for awhile; like all fruitful growth, it grew into decay: like all decay of what was once fruitful, it will grow into something new.”3 Already in 1880, three years before reading Capital, he sensed the dialectical movement of history:
“Ancient civilization was chained to slavery and exclusiveness, and it fell; the barbarism that took its place has delivered us from slavery and grown into modern civilization; and that in its turn has before it the choice of never-ceasing growth, or destruction by that which has in it the seeds of higher growth.”4
But, while this dialectical understanding of change, growth and decay, was ever-present in his writing, he saw man’s economic and social development always as the master-process, and tended to suggest that the arts were passively dependent upon social change. In the 1880s he suggested more than once that the arts must “die” with capitalist society, and could only be re-born when Socialist society had for many years been established. “The old art is no longer fertile”, he wrote—
“no longer yields us anything save elegantly poetical regrets; being barren it has but to die, and the matter of moment now is, how it shall die, with hope, or without it…”1 “Once again I warn you against supposing, you who may specially love art, that you will do any good by attempting to revivify art by dealing with its dead exterior…”2 “For my part I believe that if we try to realize the aims of art without much troubling ourselves what the aspect of the art itself shall be, we shall find we shall have what we want at last; whether it is to be called art or not, it will at least be life; and, after all, that is what we want.”3
We can see how Ruskin’s challenge in Unto This Last was still echoing in his mind—“There is no Wealth but Life.” If the source of art was “pleasure” in labour, then Socialism seemed to him the necessary precondition of its rebirth. “It is possible”, he wrote,
“that all the old superstitions and conventionalities of art have got to be swept away before art can be born again; that before that new birth we shall have to be left bare of everything that has been called art; that we shall have nothing left us but the materials of art, that is the human race with its aspirations and passions and its home, the earth; on which materials we shall have to use these tools, leisure and desire.”4
And so he still viewed the matter in one of his last and clearest statements:
“I do not believe in the possibility of keeping art vigorously alive by the action, however energetic, of a few groups of specially gifted men and their small circle of admirers amidst a general public incapable of understanding and enjoying their work. I hold firmly to the opinion that all worthy schools of art must be in the future, as they have been in the past, the outcome of the aspirations of the people towards the beauty and true pleasure of life… These aspirations of the people towards beauty can only be born from a condition of practical equality… I am so confident that this equality will be gained, that I am prepared to accept as a consequence of the process of that gain, the seeming disappearance of what art is now left us; because I am sure that that will be but a temporary loss, to be followed by a genuine new birth of art, which will be the spontaneous expression of the pleasure of life innate in the whole people.”1
“Any one who professes to think that the question of art and cultivation must go before that of the knife and fork… does not understand what art means”, he wrote.2 At the end of the nineteenth century this was one of the most important lessons which an artist of his stature—and one, moreover, who had been brought to Socialism in part for the sake of art itself—could voice abroad. Morris’s lectures tore down the precious veils before the Palace of Art, challenged the late romantic postures of self-conceit and self-dramatization, revealed the enormous reserves of creative energy in the people, and stimulated the discussion of cultural problems within the working-class movement. Moreover, Morris did not fall into the error of supposing that the working class could enter upon their heritage in the arts without arduous struggle to master the best traditions of the past, and to cast out the inferior traditions of commercialized culture:
“People sometimes talk as though the ordinary man in the street… is the proper person to apply to for a judgement on Works of Art. They say he is unsophisticated, and so on. Now, just let us look the facts in the face… As a matter of fact, he is not unsophisticated. On the contrary he is steeped in the mere dregs of all the Arts that are current at the time he lives. Is not that absolutely and positively the state of the case?… I am perfectly certain that in the Art of Music what the ‘unsophisticated’ person takes to is not the fine works of Art, but the ordinary, commonplace, banal tunes which are drummed into his ears at every street corner. That is natural… There is a tendency for all people to fall under the domination of tradition of some sort; and the fine tradition, the higher tradition, having disappeared, men will certainly fall into the power of the lower and inferior tradition. Therefore let us once for all get rid of the idea of the mass of the people having an intuitive idea of Art, unless they are in immediate connection with the great traditions of times past… “1
Only on rare occasions did Morris suggest the possibility that the revolutionary working class (as opposed to the “ordinary man” in the capitalist street) might itself be the creator of new traditions and a new art:
“May we not hope that we shall not have to wait for the new birth of art till we attain the peace of the realized New Order? Is it not at least possible… that what will give the death-blow to the vulgarity of life which enwraps us all now will be the great tragedy of Social Revolution, and that the worker will then once more begin to have a share in art, when he begins to see his aim clear before him—his aim of a share of real life for all men—and when his struggle for that aim has begun? It is not the excitement of battling for a great and worthy end which is the foe to art, but the dead weight of sordid, unrelieved anxiety, the anxiety for the daily earning of a wretched pittance by labour degrading at once to body and mind…”2
More often he suggested the likelihood of the transitional stage of Socialism proving to be a “blank” in the arts, until the people should “take up the chain where it fell from the hands of the craft-guilds of the fifteenth century.”3 Indeed, despite his own Socialist poetry, and the importance he laid upon cultural activity in the Socialist movement, Morris repeatedly leaves the impression that he had come to regard the poetry and painting of his time (including his own) as in some way marginal activities. As early as 1882 he had expressed the feeling that Swinburne’s poems were “founded on literature, not on nature”, and continued:
“In these days the issue between art, that is, the godlike part of man, and mere bestiality, is so momentous, and the surroundings of life are so stern and unplayful, that nothing can take serious hold of people, or should do so, but that which is rooted deepest in reality and is quite at first hand: there is no room for anything which is not forced out of a man of deep feeling, because of its innate strength and vision.
“In all this I may be quite wrong… I only state my opinion, I don’t defend it; still less do I my own poetry…”1
III. Chants for Socialists and The Pilgrims of Hope
Morris’s creative writing, after he joined the Socialist movement, falls into three groupings. First, the occasional propagandist poems—published as Chants for Socialists, in the main written for Justice or Commonweal between 1883 and 1886, and the long narrative poem, The Pilgrims of Hope, written for Commonweal in instalments in 1885. Second, A Dream of John Ball (1886) and News from Nowhere (1890), also written in instalments for Commonweal And third, the late prose romances, beginning with The House of Wolfings (1888) and concluding with The Sundering Flood —finished a few days before Morris’s death.
Morris did not write the Chants for the critics, or even for posterity, but simply for the day-to-day needs of the movement—for Hyndman’s debate with Bradlaugh, for a Socialist League entertainment, for the funeral of Linnell. If they served the occasion for which they were written, then they had done the job which he intended them to do. And they did do this job to such a degree that it is as part of the history of the early Socialist movement that they must be judged. “Sometimes in summer-time”, recalled F.W. Jowett,
“the joint forces of Leeds and Bradford Socialism tramped together to spread the gospel by printed and spoken word in neighbouring villages. And at eventide, on the way home, as we walked in country lanes or on river bank, we sang—
‘What is this, the sound and rumour? What is this that all men hear,
Like the wind in hollow valleys when the storm is drawing near,
Like the rolling on of ocean in the eventide of fear?
’Tis the people marching on…’
And we believed they were!”1
Morris did not feel it to be the least an offence against his dignity, or the Purity of Art, that he should be asked to do this job. He could not understand the “art for art’s sake” argument.2 If verse written under these conditions should turn out to be ephemeral, this did not trouble him in the least. The Socialist movement stood for “life”, and if his poems helped to feed this life, they found their immortality in the spirit of the movement which they helped to shape. He did not labour to create new forms. He strove simply to do the best he could with the materials which lay to his hand:
“O why and for what are we waiting? while our brothers droop and die, And on every wind of the heavens a wasted life goes by.
“How long shall they reproach us where crowd on crowd they dwell, Poor ghosts of the wicked city, the gold-crushed hungry hell?
“Through squalid life they laboured, in sordid grief they died, Those sons of a mighty mother, those props of England’s pride.”
And the poems caught fire in the hearts of the comrades whose feelings were already high within them, and whose previous knowledge of romantic verse had accustomed them to the material which Morris used.
With all this it may be said—without either belittling the poems or condemning them for not being what they never were intended to be—that the Chants cannot be said to lay the foundations of a poetry of “revolutionary realism”. Look back at these verses and note both how moving and effective they are—how unquestionable in their sincerity, their horror at the waste beyond remedy; and also how much they rely upon words, images, rhythms coined in the romantic movement. The city is “wicked” and a “hell”, like Shelley’s “London”: the lives of the workers are “squalid” and “sordid”, and they are “poor ghosts” who “droop and die”. The sense of “crowds” as something oppressive is present. Morris rarely expresses any sense of vitality in the working class, but only in the “Cause” itself, the hope of the future. The hatred of industrialism as such is never absent for long.
The Pilgrims of Hope provides many examples of this. At its opening stands “The Message of the March Wind”—a remarkable poem, which is fully within the tradition of late romanticism. The setting of the poem is that of pastoral peace, with its increase and fruition, and its ancient associations—the ox-yard, the grey church, the grey homes of our fathers. Into this peace comes the “March wind”, which we cannot help feeling is a close relation to Shelley’s “West Wind”—the “destroyer and preserver”. On the one hand it tells of the city, of “unrest” and “gold”, and the “haggard and grim” life of the people. On the other it tells of the “hope of the people” and “strife”. Where Shelley’s message is idealized to the point of abstraction—a hatred of tyranny, a generalized aspiration towards freedom—Morris’s accusation against the “great city”, London, commercialism, is far more specific. Its crime lies in the poverty and wearisome toil of the workers, their deprivation of any part in this pastoral beauty, and of the heritage of the arts. But the effect of the poem is not one of courage and decision in the awakened struggle. Rather, there is an undertow of regret at the passing of this peace. “Shall we be glad always?” the lovers ask. And the answer seems to come, “Hark, the wind in the elm-boughs!” This moment of love, poised before the entering of the struggle, is a sad moment: foreshadowing the loss of rest, ease of mind, beauty, even of love. The slow-moving line, “This land we have loved in our love and our leisure”, scarcely conceals the nostalgia underneath. And then the sharp change of focus, to the interior so reminiscent of a scene from one of Hardy’s tales of the passing of rural England:
“Come back to the inn, love, and the lights and the fire,
And the fiddler’s old tune and the shuffling of feet…”
Here is a glimpse of a warm community, where the lovers are secure and at ease. The poem leaves us less with a sense of of hope than with the poignancy of loss? Surely it is no accident that it is to this idealized pastoral scene that the hero of the poem returns at last, with his love lost in the struggle, and “the half of life gone”:
“The forks shine white in the sun round the yellow red-wheeled wain, Where the mountain of hay grows fast; and now from out of the lane Comes the ox-team drawing another, comes the bailiff and the beer, And thump, thump, goes the farmer’s nag o’er the narrow bridge of the weir.”
“The Message of the March Wind” was written for the March number of Commonweal in 1885, at the time when Morris had thrust upon him by events the responsibility for the leadership of a section of the Socialist movement. It is perhaps not far-fetched to suggest that it gives a moment of insight into the turmoil of Morris’s personal feelings at the time. It suggests to us how strong the grip of his will and his political convictions had to be over his inclinations—inclinations which rebelled at the daily struggle in the heart of industrial capitalism, and which beckoned him back to Kelm-scott and the repose of his art.
Thereafter The Pilgrims of Hope seems to make several false starts, to be hesitant in plot and direction, until—halfway through—it finds in the Commune and the sundering of the lovers by the friend a theme which carries it through to the end. The weaknesses are obvious and need cause no surprise. The poem was written hastily in monthly instalments for Commonweal, and Morris did not wish it to be re-published without considerable revision.1 But, for all this, it contains passages where the dramatic power overcomes the facility (which is sometimes downright slapdash) of the writing. Among such are the famous “New Birth”—the conversion to Socialism: the brawl at an open-air meeting and arrest of the hero: the meeting with the bourgeois war-machine in Paris; and the fine “Sending to the War”, where the jingo military parade through London streets lined with poverty and unemployment gives place suddenly to the dream of the “deeds of another day”:
“Far and far was I borne, away o’er the years to come,
And again was the ordered march, and the thunder of the drum,
And the bickering points of steel, and the horses shifting about
‘Neath the flashing swords of the captains—then the silence after the shout—
“Sun and wind in the street, familiar things made clear,
Made strange by the breathless waiting for the deeds that are drawing a-near.
For woe had grown into will, and wrath was bared of its sheath,
And stark in the streets of London stood the crop of the dragon’s teeth.
Where then in my dream were the poor and the wall of faces wan?
Here and here by my side, shoulder to shoulder of man,
Hope in the simple folk, hope in the hearts of the wise,
For the happy life to follow, or death and the ending of lies,
Hope is awake in the faces angerless now no more,
Till the new peace dawn on the world, the fruit of the people’s war…”
The remarkable thing about The Pilgrims of Hope is not the weakness in construction, which might be expected, or the technical slackness bred of haste and lack of concentration, but the degree to which Morris succeeds in escaping from the limitations of middle-class experience and outlook. In many touches—the reduction of the hero to a wage-labourer, his humiliation by his employer, his sufferings in unemployment—Morris succeeds in presenting capitalist society with a realism which he does not attempt in any other of his creative writings. Moreover, the poem rediscovers (although within a romantic mode) heroic values which the romantic tradition could envisage only in a stereotyped literary past of legend: Morris discloses the heroic in the everyday events of the revolutionary propaganda, and in the Commune. Even in the sad theme of the sundering of the lovers, with its obvious echoes from Morris’s personal life, there is a dignity, and in particular a respect for the woman’s personality and emotional identity which is alien to the conventions of Victorian romanticism.
But new attitudes, new advances in human consciousness, cannot find their complete expression in the forms of the old. In a letter of 1891 Morris remarked humourously of a poem he was writing: “My wig! but it is garrulous: I can’t help it, the short lines and my old recollections lead me on…”1 “My old recollections…”—this is an exact description of the process by which Morris, in his hasty writing, fell into the rhythms, the associations, the vocabulary of his apprenticeship to poetry. Moreover, as we have seen, Morris still clung to his Pre-Raphaelite view that art, by definition, must be “a thing of beauty”, and that beauty and realism in the nineteenth century must be incompatible. It was in the year in which he wrote The Pilgrims of Hope that he wrote to Fred Henderson:
“Now language is utterly degraded in our daily lives, and poets have to make a new tongue each for himself: before he can even begin his story he must elevate his means of expression from the daily jabber to which centuries of degradation have reduced it.”2
But this special vocabulary of poetry had been fashioned by late romanticism (and most notably by Morris himself in his own middle period) to provide a dream-world of aspiration untarnished by the sordid realities, a “poetic” refuge from “the world”. Clearly, it could not be adequate to give full expression to Morris’s new experience and convictions.
Morris no longer saw his art as the central battlefield: if he could strike a blow there for the “Cause”, so much the better. The immediate task—as he saw it—was to change life itself: he was too old, too busy, too much a romantic bred and born, to concentrate his faculties at the end of his life upon transforming his art. There would be time enough for those who came after him to do that. “If I can’t be the Laureate of reading men”, he remarked on one occasion, “I’ll be the Laureate of sweating men.” In the small Socialist movement he felt there was being built an audience of a new type, where labour and intellect, action and reflection, were no longer opposed, and where the poet (like the scald and makar of old) was regarded not as an eccentric or a fragile genius but as a craftsman with special gifts, of value to the community, exercising these gifts to please both himself and his fellows. A friend of his relates that once, in the underground, a working man recognized Morris and accosted him: “They tell me you’re a poet, Mr. Morris? Well, I know nothing about poets or poetry, but I’m blooming well sure I know a man, and you’re one, by God!” Morris was delighted, and said afterwards: “That’s the stuff I’m working for, and, mark you, that’s the stuff, too, that in the long run I’m working for in prose and poetry as well.”1
IV. The Prose Romances
Between 1888 and the end of his life scarcely a year passed when Morris did not add one or more lengthy volume to his series of prose romances. Chief among them were The House of the Wolfings, and The Roots of the Mountains, written during the last years of the Socialist League: and, in succeeding years, The Well at the World’s End, The Wood Beyond the World, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, and The Sundering Flood. These romances appear to present a strange contrast to Morris’s active political and intellectual life. To Shaw they were “a startling relapse into literary Pre-Raphaelitism”—“nothing more nor less than the resuscitation of Don Quixote’s burnt library”.1 Whatever judgement be made upon them, they certainly provide a striking example of the strange and unpredictable courses which the creative imagination will follow.
From beginning to end, Morris’s writing (with the exception of The Pilgrims of Hope) partakes of the nature of dream. We are taken out of the world we know into a world having its existence only in the writer’s imagination, with its own inner consistency and its own laws, unlike those of the real world but related distantly to them. Into this world of dream Morris was driven by his “hatred of civilization” during his youthful revolt: and ever after his imagination found its natural expression in this form. Ralph and Ursula, in The Well at the World’s End are told by the Elder of the Innocent Folk:
“For ye of the World beyond the Mountains are stronger and more godlike than we… and ye wear away your lives desiring that which ye may scarce get; and yet set your hearts on high things, desiring to be masters of the very Gods. Therefore ye know sickness and sorrow, and oft ye die before your time, so that ye must depart and leave undone things which ye deem ye were born to do; which to all men is grievous. And because of all this ye desire healing and thriving, whether good come of it, or ill. Therefore ye do but right to seek to the Well at the World’s End, that ye may the better accomplish that which behoveth you, and that yc may serve your fellows and deliver them from the thralldom of those that be strong and unwise and unkind, of whom we have heard strange tales.”
At the root of the dream lies this separation between the boundless desire of the heart and the poor or bitter realities of life, the thirst for waters at the world’s end. But while this helps us to understand something of the character of the dream-form—the “poetic” vocabulary of The Earthly Paradise, the archaic diction, unworldly relationships, and leisurely hypnotic rhythms of the prose romances—it tells us by no means all.
The extraordinary thing about Morris’s employment of dream lies in the wide variety of uses to which he put it. At times he used dream to build a compensation-world to which he could escape; at other times he constructed a world with values and conditions totally unlike his own, only in order to be able to criticize and understand his own the better. We should not forget that the dream was the form he chose for his realistic meditations, upon the meaning of history (A Dream of John Ball) and upon the quality of life in- a Communist society (News from Nowhere). In his late years Morris consciously turned his predisposition towards dream into a means of liberating his imagination from the sordid restrictions of a society he hated. He was not ashamed of the romantic nature of his art, although he did not recommend others to imitate it. “The feeling for art in us artists is genuine”, he wrote in 1893, “though we have to work in the midst of the ignorance of those whose whole life ought to be spent in the production of works of art.” But the blossom of the art of the future, “I shall not see: therefore I may be excused if, in common with other artists, I try to express myself through the art of to-day, which seems to us to be only a survival of the organic art of the past…”1
The first two prose romances, The House of the Wolfings (1888) and The Roots of the Mountains (1889), employ the dream-form differently from the romances of his last four or five years. This makes them more acceptable than the others to the reader who approaches them with a literal mind. In certain respects they are more realistic: where the supernatural intervenes it is more as a manifestation of the beliefs of the people than as an external device of the plot. The narrative flows from the action of the characters, not primarily—as in the last romances—from the tricks of magic, wood-goddesses, witches, and wierd.
Nevertheless, these romances should not be read with a literal mind, or Morris’s intention will be misunderstood. He knew perfectly well that he could not reconstruct with accurate detail the lives of the Germanic peoples at the dawn of the Middle Ages, although such detail as he did know—of craftsmanship, custom, and circumstance—he employed to construct the special atmosphere of these two dreams. He knew well that his “Folk of the Kindreds” and “woodland carles” would not really have conversed, made love and quarrelled with the melodious courtesy which he gave to them. His intention was quite different, and was expressed in a letter while he was working on The House of the Wolfings: “It is meant to illustrate the melting of the individual into the society of the tribes…”1 The dream-picture is quite consciously idealized.2 Morris had long been fascinated by the contribution which the Germanic peoples had made toward the art and social structure of feudalism in Western Europe.3 With his conversion to Socialism, this interest deepened and his knowledge of the life of the Germanic tribes was supplemented in his many discussions with Belfort Bax.
In Socialism: its Growth and Outcome Morris and Bax referred to the difference between the “impersonal state” and the “simple and limited kinship group”:
“The difference between these opposing circumstances of society is, in fact, that between an organism and a mechanism. The earlier condition in which everything, art, science… law, industry, were personal, and aspects of a living body, is opposed to the civilized condition in which all these elements have become mechanical, uniting to build up mechanical life, and themselves the product of machines material and moral.”1
It was Morris’s intention in these two romances to recapture something of the organic and personal life of the tribe or folk: and (as, later, in News from Nowhere) he was concerned not so much with the details as with the quality of life.
The House of the Wolfings is marred by the unsuccessful combination of prose and verse, and by the intrusion of the Pre-Raphaelite maiden, the Hall-Sun. Morris is at his weakest in these two romances when treating personal relationships. His strength is found always in his treatment of social relations, in the collective life of the folk, in the Hall, at the Folk-Mote, in their labour, their battles, their ceremonies. From the opening paragraphs, we are given that strong sense of place, of the relation between man and his environment in his struggle with nature, which recurs in all the last romances:
“For many generations the folk that now dwelt there had learned the craft of iron-founding, so that they had no lack of wares of iron and steel, whether they were tools of handicraft or weapons for hunting and for war. It was the men of the Folk, who coming adown by the riverside had made that clearing. The tale tells not whence they came, but belike from the dales of the distant mountains, and from dales and mountains and plains further aloof and yet further.”
Thiodolf’s speech to the Wood-Sun is an expression of the values uniting the kindreds:
“Mine eyes are cleared again, and I can see the kindreds as they are, and their desire of life and scorn of death, and this is what they have made me myself. Now therefore shall they and I together earn the merry days to come, the winter hunting and the spring sowing, the summer haysel, the ingathering of harvest, the happy rest of midwinter, and Yuletide with the memory of the Fathers, wedded to the hope of the days to be. Well may they bid me help them who have holpen me! Well may they bid me die who have made me live!… I have lived with them, and eaten and drunken with them, and toiled with them, and led them in battle and the place of wounds and slaughter; they are mine and I am theirs; and through them am I of the whole earth, and all the kindreds of it…”
Morris’s vocabulary, with its emphasis upon antiquity and the difference between the values of the folk and those of to-day, is an essential part of his purpose. As he becomes more sure of himself, in The Roots of the Mountains, the clumsy and self-conscious archaisms become less noticeable, and the vocabulary becomes melodious and consistent, sustaining the remote, impersonal and dream-like quality in which the values of the peoples can be shadowed forth. Had he been content, in this second romance, to have limited his tale to the central theme of the reuniting of the kindreds and their resistance to the invaders, treating the whole in an aloof and impersonal manner, The Roots of the Mountains would have stood high among his work. Unfortunately he chose to weave in and out of it his romantic love themes (not, unfortunately, without Victorian overtones), which are incompatible with the more serious intention of the whole.
Moreover, we are already aware in The Roots of the Mountains of the motive for writing which becomes dominant in the other late romances—that of pure self-indulgence in pleasurable reverie in which neither Morris’s intellect nor his deeper feelings are seriously engaged. He had at first intended that the Bride should die during the tale, but he changed his mind, marrying her to Folk-Might, with the rationalization, “it would be a very good alliance for the Burgdalers and the Silverdalers both, and I don’t think sentiment ought to stand in the way.”1 Well and good: but such repeated compromises rob the tale of its dignity and sombre interest, and reduce it to the level of wilful fantasy—like an imaginative child’s daydreams, set forth in noble prose, and shot through with a mature men’s insight into history. The final fight for Silver-dale is described with all of Morris’s clear pictorial genius; but the issue is never in doubt, neither heroes nor heroines are ever seriously endangered, it is a mere skirmish beside the daylong fight by the ford in The House of the Wolfings. As one critic has shown, Morris had come to have a reluctance to “suffer imaginatively”.1 From the Life and Death of Jason onwards, his creative writing had tended to become facile-something which engaged only half of his attention—and he had met and engaged with his age on other grounds. No doubt when he started the romance he had proposed to carry forward the tale of the kindreds to a further point in history; but he had fallen victim to his desire to please himself, and if he was disappointed with the book’s reception he had himself to blame.
Thereafter came a series of romances: The Story of the Glittering Plain (1890); The Well at the World’s End (commenced 1892); The Wood Beyond the World (1894); The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1895); and The Sundering Flood (1896); as well as several shorter tales and translations. In all these romances Morris’s desire to please himself is uppermost—just as the Kelmscott Press was no part of the earlier “warfare against the age” of the Firm but was a source of unashamed enjoyment to the designer. When a critic detected a Socialist allegory in The Wood Beyond the World, Morris was quick to disillusion him: “it is meant for a tale pure and simple, with nothing didactic about it”.2
Approached with a mind earnestly seeking hidden truths, these romances would be unreadable. But if they are read in the same mood as that in which they were written, Morris’s own pleasure is infectious. Here his mind and imagination are “free-wheeling”, and his artistry in story-telling is given loose rein. All the tales move in a vague medieval setting, peculiar to Morris’s imagination. The intention of the tales is, above all, decorative. They are fairy-stories, legends, for which the belief of the active mind is not invited. Suffering, pain or death are passed over in a paragraph, while sensuous beauty or physical love are embroidered for whole chapters. Hero and heroine bear charmed lives, and the evil witch and baron are always worsted. If there are battles and blood, the scarlet threads look pleasant in the tapestry.
Had Morris gone soft in the head? Is this really a return to The Earthly Paradise, and the evasion and fear of life which lurked under it? Not in the least. Some element of relaxation, rather than refuge, from life is present: as also perhaps some element of compensation for what he had missed, as he embroidered lovers on his own regret. But the undertow of death, the sense of guilt, the oscillation between sensuous joy and horror that underlay The Earthly Paradise are vanquished. In only one romance is any really significant decision taken freely by hero or heroine: and that is when the hero in The Story of the Glittering Plain chooses to leave the Acre of the Undying and return to the land of mortality, to his kindred and his love. Striving to enter the Acre of the Undying, across deserts and mountain passes, are men who resemble the restless and unsatisfied Wanderers of The Earthly Paradise and upon these the story turns its back.
In these curious fairy-stories there are echoes from all of Morris’s previous work.1 But all are muted in the prevailing mood of calm and fulfilment. These are tales, not so much of desire unsatisfied, but of desire fulfilled. The water of the well at the world’s end, which Ralph and Ursula drink, is not of immortality but of more abundant life. In each tale, hero and heroine start from a secure hearth and home in a society pictured with realistic detail, pass through adventures, trials and magic experience, but return in the end once again to their homes. Most characteristic is The Waters of the Wondrous Isles, with its plot formed almost like a perfect figure-of-eight: the stealing of Birdalone as a child from the town by the wood; her growth to a young maiden in the cottage by the lakeside, tending the goats and hunting in the wood; her escape across the lake, with its magic isles which figure like a repeated decorative motif; her encounter with her lover; her retirement to the City of the Five Crafts; her return across the lake; the fulfilment of her love, without marriage rite or ceremony, in the cottage where she grew up as a girl; and final return with her lover to the town of her birth. Where, in The Earthly Paradise, pleasure had always seemed an uneasy dream on the edge of a bitter reality, here we are always on the edge of awakening to the freshness and fulfilment of life, as when Birdalone dreams:
“Somehow were they two, the witch and she, amidmost of the Isle of Nothing, and the witch drew close anigh her, and was just going to whisper into her ear something of measureless horror, when she awoke; and the sun was bright outside the shaded whiteness of her tent; the shadows of the leaves were dancing on the ground of it; the morning wind was rustling the tree-boughs, and the ripple of the stream was tinkling hard by…”
This freshness, this sense of growth in the June English countryside, of the continuity of life, is the reality beneath the romance. This is the Morris whom Yeats knew and described as the “Happiest of Poets”.1 The mournful Pre-Raphaelite ladies of earlier days have given way, in these romances to maidens who can shoot with the bow, swim, ride and generally do most things, including making love, a good deal more capably than their young men, who weep for joy so often that it is a matter of surprise that their armour does not fall to pieces with rust. Perhaps this is a sign of Morris’s views on the rights of women, or a cunning way of revenging himself on Belfort Bax. However that may be, ever and again into these last strange romances there seems to come the figure of Ellen from News from Nowhere, saying: “The earth and the growth of it and the life of it! If I could but say or show how I love it!”
V. The Society of the Future
Morris’s claim to importance as a political theorist rests upon two grounds. First, he was one of the earliest, and remains one of the most original and creative thinkers within the Marxist tradition in England. Second, he was a pioneer of constructive thought as to the organization of social life within Communist society.
No one familiar with Socialist theory can doubt that Morris stood within the Marxist tradition, despite certain secondary circumstances which have clouded the issue.1 The evidence is to be found, not in coloured reminiscences or second-hand opinions, but in Morris’s own political writings.
The whole of Morris’s Socialist writing is rich in illustrations of the class struggle. This, indeed, was to him the point of prime importance, distinguishing revolutionary Socialism from Reformism. Referring directly to Sidney Webb and the Fabians, he wrote in 1889:
“What is the real gate which will pull up these soft Socialists, who so long as they are allowed to steal the goose will not object to give the giblets to the poor? This is the barrier which they will not be able to pass, so long as they are in their present minds, the acknowledgement of the class war. The ‘Socialists’ of this kind are blind as to the essence of modern society. They hope for a revolution, which is not the Revolution, but a revolution which is to ignore the facts that have led up to it and will bring it about…
“It is most important that young Socialists should have this fact of the class-war always before them. It explains past history, and in the present gives us the only solid hope for the future. And it must be understood that it is only by the due working out of this class-war to its end, the abolition of classes, that Socialism can come about… The middle-class semi-Socialists, driven by class instinct, preach revolution without the class struggle; which is an absurdity and an impossibility.1
The objection that the Socialists themselves create the class-war, he brushed aside with contempt:
“Who or what sets class against class? The whole evolution of society. That is, the existence of the classes.”2
Morris accepted also the Marxist theory of the State. The privilege of the capitalist class, he never tired of repeating,
“is but the privilege of the robber by force of arms, is just the thing which it is the aim and end of our present organization to uphold; and all the formidable executive at the back of it, army, police, law courts, presided over by the judge as representing the executive, is directed towards this one end—to take care that the richest shall rule, and shall have full licence to injure the commonwealth to the full extent of his riches.”3
His experience in the fight for free speech, and on “Bloody Sunday”, rid him of any illusions as to the impartiality of capitalist justice, and his one Socialist play, The Tables Turned: or Nupkins Awakened, is a bitter satire on the procedure of the courts in these cases—the difference in the treatment of rich and poor, the perjury of the police, the stupidity and prejudice of the judge. Commenting on the aftermath of “Bloody Sunday”, he wrote: “Thus at one stroke vanishes the dream of bringing about peaceably and constitutionally the freedom which we long for.” If the bourgeoisie were made really afraid by the rising movement, and not merely “a little alarmed”, “then we shall see suppression of indoor meetings also: suppression of association, Press prosecutions, and the like; and there is plenty of law for all that”.1
Morris did not shrink from any of the revolutionary conclusions which flow from these principles. Above all, his writings and life reveal inflexible opposition to imperialism and chauvinism in any form. Regard, for example, his notes in Commonweal when war between Germany and France seemed possible:
“If war really becomes imminent our duties as Socialists are clear enough, and do not differ from those we have to act on ordinarily. To further the spread of international feeling between the workers by all means possible; to point out to our own workmen that foreign competition and rivalry, or commercial war, culminating at last in open war, are necessities of the plundering classes, and that the race and commercial quarrels of these classes only concern us so far as we can use them as opportunities for fostering discontent and revolution; that the interests of the workmen are the same in all countries and they can never really be enemies of each other; that the men of our labouring classes, therefore, should turn a deaf ear to the recruiting sergeant, and refuse to allow themselves to be dressed up in red and be taught to form a part of the modern killing machine for the honour and glory of a country in which they have only a dog’s share of many kicks and few halfpence,—all this we have to preach always, though in the event of imminent war we may have to preach it more emphatically.”2
In one further point Morris’s writing and his practice prepare us for themes made familiar by the experience of this century: in his search for the best type of organization and leadership for the revolutionary Socialist party. His views were worked out through trial and error. He came to think in terms of a party of “cadres”, convinced propagandists and agitators, drawn in the main from the working class (p. 410), which would in the revolutionary period assume leadership of that class’s wider organizations.3 He stressed always that subordination of “individual whims” to the collective decisions of the party (p. 304), whose leadership should not be made up of a “government and an opposition” (p. 533). Full-time organizers should be “kept in very strict order” by the party (p. 477), and should representatives be sent to Parliament or onto other bodies, it must be understood that they went not as individuals but as delegates of the party “under good party discipline” (p. 614). “I now see”, he wrote to Mahon in 1886, “the absolute necessity of discipline in a fighting body, which of course in no sense resembles the Societys of the future.”1
Morris was well aware of the dangers of speculating about the form of this future society. “It is impossible to build up a scheme for the society of the future”, he wrote,
“for no man can really think himself out of his own days; his palace of days to come can only be constructed from the aspirations forced upon him by his present surroundings, and from his dreams of the life of the past, which themselves cannot fail to be more or less unsubstantial imaginings.”2
Nevertheless, the 1880s and 1890s were rich with speculations of this kind, and Morris made many contributions to them.
Morris’s picture of the future found twofold expression: first, in many scattered references and passages in his lectures and articles; and second in News from Nowhere. In both places he had no intention whatsoever to make cut-and-dried prophecies, but rather to make hints and suggestions. These suggestions are not always consistent with each other: the choices before men in a Communist society (he saw) were numerous, the manifestations of their social life would take many forms. For example, he made no pretence at consistency when speculating as to the architecture of Communism. In News from Nowhere he leaves the suggestion that the majority of the people live in detached villas and cottages, with here and there in the countryside a college of learning and manufacture. In other writings he dwelt more often on the idea of communal dwelling-houses, “with good public cooking and washing rooms… beautiful halls for the common meal… a pleasant and ample garden, and a good play-ground.”1 Again he proposed (especially for London) tall blocks of flats “in what might be called vertical streets”, with ample privacy for each family, common laundries and kitchens, and public rooms for social gathering.2 “Often when I have been sickened by the stupidity of the mean idiotic rabbit warrens that rich men build for themselves in Bayswater”, he wrote,
“I console myself with visions of the noble communal hall of the future, unsparing of materials, generous in worthy ornament, alive with the noblest thoughts of our time, and the past, embodied in the best art which a free and manly people could produce…”
“I can’t see why we should think it a hardship to eat with the people we work with; I am sure that as to many things, such as valuable books, pictures… we shall find it better to club our means together…”3 In both News from Nowhere and the lectures, the emphasis is upon the communal life. But (as Morris never ceased to repeat) true individualism was only possible in a Communist society, which needed and valued the contribution of each individual to the common good; and, in a society which fostered true variety, he knew that different men would choose to live in different ways.
Morris tended, in his speculations, to leap over the transitional stage of Socialism, and come to rest in fully-established Communist society. When Socialism “ceases to be militant and becomes triumphant”, he wrote, “it will be Communism”.4 Following St. Simon, he emphasized that “government” in a Socialist society would become increasingly rather “an administration of things than a government of persons”1 Throughout his theoretical writings he made use of the contrast (first learned from Carlyle) of “false” and “true” society—of property relations and laws on the one hand, and human relations and morality on the other:
“That true society of loved and lover, parent and child, friend and friend, the society of well-wishers, of reasonable people conscious of the aspirations of humanity and of the duties we owe to it through one another—this society, I say, is held together and exists by its own inherent right and reason, in spite of what is usually thought to be the cement of society, arbitrary authority…”
Thus Communist society implied the re-establishment of the personal and voluntary bonds of society and the disappearance of the impersonal and compulsive relations based on the ownership of property and the maintenance of class rule—the re-creation of the society of “the Wolfings” shorn of its barbarity and superstition, and enriched by the culture of past ages. The “withering away of the state” assumed great importance to Morris, not (in the negative sense employed by some of his Anarchist colleagues) as the absence of all social bonds, but in the positive sense of the re-establishment at a higher level than known before of the human and personal bonds existing even within a class society.
In this respect, he sought to distinguish his views from those of the Fabian State Socialists on the one hand, and the Anarchists on the other. “Even some Socialists”, he wrote, “are apt to confuse… the co-operative machinery towards which modern life is tending with the essence of Socialism itself.”2 From this there followed—
“the danger of the community falling into bureaucracy, the multiplication of boards and offices, and all the paraphernalia of official authority, which is, after all, a burden, even when it is exercised by the delegation of the whole people and in accordance with their wishes.”1
With Communism, he suggested, the central machinery of the State would disappear (except in so far as it was necessary in arranging matters of production and distribution), not because the citizens would have fewer public responsibilities, but because they would shoulder more themselves. He quarrelled with Bellamy’s Looking Backward because it gave the impression that “the organization of life and necessary labour” would be dealt with in Socialist society “by a huge national centralization, working by a kind of magic for which no one feels himself responsible.” On the contrary, he declared:
“It will be necessary for the unit of administration to be small enough for every citizen to feel himself responsible for its details, and be interested in them; that individual men cannot shuffle off the business of life on to the shoulders of an abstraction called the State, but must deal with it in conscious association with each other… Variety of life is as much an aim of true Communism as equality of condition, and… nothing but an union of these two will bring about real freedom.”2
Writing on another occasion, he said:
“To my mind in the new Society, we should form bodies like municipalities, county-boards and parishes, and almost all practical public work would be done by these bodies the members of whom would be working at and living by their ordinary work, and… everybody who had any capacity for such work would have to do his share of it.”3
Controversies in such a society would be more upon matters of fact than of conflicting interests: “Would this or that project benefit the community more?” And the existence of party spirit would be impossible or ridiculous. While the federal principle would tend to assert itself in national life, there would be (on the other hand) “the great council of the socialised world” which would have “the function of the administration of production in its wider sense”:
“It would have to see to… the collection and distribution of all information as to the wants of populations and the possibilities of supplying them… Also it would be its necessary duty to safeguard the then recognized principles of society; that is, to guard against any country, or place, or occupation reverting to methods of practices which would be destructive or harmful to the socialistic order, such as any form of the exploitation of labour…”1
Such larger federal units would be staffed by delegates from the lower federal units.
Such a society, Morris well understood, could only be reached after the transition period of Socialism, “during which people would be getting rid of the habits of mind bred by the long ages of tyranny and commercial competition…”. The fundamental step was not the destruction of all personal property, but of the power for individuals to “turn it into an instrument for the oppression of others”.2 Above all, Morris constantly insisted that even the initial stages of Socialism would lead to an inconceivable transformation in people, in their values, relationships, and outlook:
“It is not a small change in life that we advocate, but a very great one… Socialism will transform our lives and habits, and leave the greater part of the political social and religious controversies that we are now so hot about forgotten, useless and lifeless like wrecks stranded on a sea-shore.”3
“We shall adore what we used to burn, and burn what we used to adore.”4
Education, whatever form it took (and few will agree wholeheartedly with the educational system in News from Nowhere), would itself be transformed, thus accelerating the change in people:
“It must of necessity cease to be a preparation for a life of commercial success on the one hand, or of irresponsible labour on the other… It will become rather a habit of making the best of the individual’s powers in all directions to which he is led by his innate disposition; so that no man will ever ‘finish’ his education while he is alive…”1
Everywhere the spirit of the common wealth—material, moral, spiritual—will become triumphant.
On one point, above all, Morris expressed himself with strong personal feeling. The division between the intellectual and the worker, the man of “genius” and the people, the manual and “brain” worker, would be finally ended. Although he is unlikely to have read it, Morris reached in his intuitive way the most important statements of Marx in The Critique of the Gotha Programme:
“In a higher phase of Communist society, after the enslaving subordination of individuals under division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished, after labour has become not merely a means to live but has become itself the primary necessity of life, after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”2
But for Morris these preconditions of Communism were in themselves primary objectives. The unity of thought and creative labour would find its realization, not only in the society as a whole, but in the life of every member of it:
“ From this healthy freedom would spring up the pleasures of intellectual development, which the men of civilization so foolishly try to separate from sensuous life, and to glorify at its expense. Men would follow knowledge and the creation of beauty for their own sakes, and not for the enslavement of their fellows… The man who felt keenest the pleasure of lying on the hill-side… among the sheep on a summer night, would be no less fit for the enjoyment of the great communal hall with all its splendours of arch and column, and vault and tracery.”1
Just as physical labour would no longer carry with it any indignity, but rather the reverse, so intellectual labour at the expense of the exercise of bodily faculties would appear as an abuse of the fullness of life.
Morris is only one of the latest in the tradition, reaching back to the ancient Greeks, where this ideal has found expression. But he was one of the first to show how it may at last be realized in a definite society. Among the ideas which influenced his young friend W.B. Yeats, this took firm root and grew to its noble expression in his poem, “Among School Children”:
“Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
Most of these reflections about Socialist society were made by Morris at different dates between 1884 and 1889, and show clearly the way in which he was turning over the ideas which found their full expression in News from Nowhere, written in instalments for Commonweal in 1890.
The writing of News from Nowhere strikes one with a sense of inevitability—it is such a characteristic expression of Morris’s genius, springing so logically from his development both as creative artist and as political theorist. With unselfconscious artistry he drew, while writing, upon those personal experiences which lay ready to hand: the story begins with his awakening at his own house in Hammersmith, strangely transformed; it ends at his own house in Kelmscott, and the journey thither up the Thames was one which he had himself enjoyed.1 When reading “How the Change Came” we are aware of Morris’s experiences on “Bloody Sunday”. We are aware throughout of his enthusiasm for Gothic architecture and of his life-long practice of the decorative arts. We are aware of current debates between himself and the Fabians and Anarchists. We are aware of his interest in the writings of Fourier, his enthusiasm for More’s Utopia, and his warm response to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.2 We are aware of the ever-present intention in Morris’s mind to contrast the variety and simplicity of the life of “Nowhere” with the bureaucratic State Socialism (or “managerial revolution”) of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which was then so much in vogue, and whose regimented labour battalions and tubular conveniences Morris dubbed “a cockney paradise”.1 Indeed, we are aware that his opposition to Looking Backward led him to wilful exaggeration, more than once, on the other side. Above all, we are aware of Morris’s practical participation in the Socialist movement, his study of Marx, his understanding of the class struggle:
“ ‘Tell me one thing, if you can’, said I. ‘Did the change… come peacefully?’
“ ‘Peacefully?’ said he. ‘What peace was there amongst those poor, confused wretches of the nineteenth century? It was war from beginning to end: bitter war, till hope and pleasure put an end to it…’ ”
What a world of personal feeling underlies such passages as this!
In sum, News from Nowhere seems to have grown spontaneously rather than to have been constructed with careful artifice. We are aware of William Morris, writing fluently in his study in the intervals of propaganda or designing, drawing on the experience of both his public and his private life, making no attempt to disguise the intrusion of his own temperamental likes and dislikes into the narrative. Indeed, he wrote on one occasion: “The only safe way of reading a Utopia is to consider it as the expression of the temperament of its author.”2
The key to the artistic power and unity of News from Nowhere lies in the fact that it is a Scientific Utopia. The contradiction implied by the coupling of these two words was intuitively perceived by Morris, and was quite deliberately turned into a fruitful source of tension, underlying the whole tale.
We have already noted that the characteristic form taken by Morris’s imagination was that of dream. But here we do not have—as in The Defence of Guenevere, or The Earthly Paradise, or The House of the Wolfings— the dream-form employed to take us entirely out of our own world into a world that is strange. In both News from Nowhere and A Dream of John Ball, Morris breaks with his usual practice, and skilfully interweaves the dream and the conscious mind, counterposing realism and romance. In both, the narrative commences with humdrum everyday reality, described in a leisurely conversational way, passes into the dream of past or future, and returns at the end to the everyday world. But, unlike The Eve of St. Agnes of his poetic master, Keats, where the bright illusion is made more poignant by the stormy and colourless reality surrounding it, reality is allowed to enter into the heart of the dream itself, in the person of Morris the narrator; and it is reality which is made more poignant by the dream when we come back to the real world at the end.
Never for long, in News from Nowhere, does Morris allow us to forget this sense of tension between the real and the ideal. This is the role which he constructs for himself as narrator. As we visit London, listen to the conversations with old Hammond, hear the characters discuss problems of morality, we do not relapse into dream—we are sometimes made uncomfortably awake. We are made to question continually our own society, our own values and lives. This is why the story engages our feelings. We cannot sit back as spectators, looking at a pretty never-never land. Always we are conscious of Morris’s troubled brow, his sense of not being a part of the scenes through which he moves. He is the link between our experience and the future.
Observe with what skill Morris builds up this tension. If he had made his narrator fall into some Rip Van Winkle sleep, and enter the new world with full explanations all round, to be conducted round by its inhabitants; if he had dispensed with the narrator altogether, and simply plunged us into the future; then all tension would have been lost. Instead, he allows an ambiguity to hang over the narrator throughout: he is troubled to understand how he is there himself; the other characters sense him as someone different; and this is a disturbing influence on their relationship; he has premonitions that he must return:
“I felt rather uncomfortable at this speech, for suddenly the picture of the sordid squabble, the dirty and miserable tragedy of the life I had left for a while, came before my eyes; and I had, as it were, a vision of all my longings for rest and peace in the past…”
It is a complex feeling—a dream of a reality in which he dreamed—and yet it is convincing, and finds its compelling expression in his relationship with Ellen:
“She looked at me kindly, but as if she readme through and through. She said: ‘You have begun your never-ending contrast between the past and this present. Is it not so?’
“ ‘True’, said I. ‘I was thinking of what you, with your capacity and intelligence, joined to your love of pleasure, and your impatience of unreasonable restraint—of what you would have been in that past. And even now, when all is won and has been for a long time, my heart is sickened with thinking of all the waste of life that has gone on for so many years.’
“ ‘So many centuries,’ she said, ‘so many ages!’ ”
This is romanticism inverted—instead of the unsatisfied aspirations rebelling against the poverty of the present, the fulfilled aspirations reveal the poverty of the past.
“This present”, “that past”, the “never-ending contrast”—in truth this is a Scientific Utopia, which no one but Morris could write. The science lies not only in the wonderful description of “How the Change Came”, the mastery of historical process, the understanding of the economic and social basis of Communism; it is present also in the element of realism embodied in the artistic construction of the work itself, the manner in which the world of dream and the world of reality are re-united. And yet it is still a Utopia, which only a writer nurtured in the romantic tradition could have conceived—a writer ever conscious of the contrast between the “ideal” and the “real”.
At the same time, this emphasizes the fact that News from Nowhere must not be, and was never intended to be, read as a literal picture of Communist society. One half of its purpose is a criticism of capitalist society, the other half a revelation of the powers slumbering within men and women and distorted or denied in class society. The method demands a heightening, an idealization. Surely Morris makes this clear in his constant opposition between strife and peace? In the midst of the wasteful struggle of capitalist society he desires, above all, rest. The tale is sub-titled “An Epoch of Rest”. It commences with the narrator hoping “for days of peace and rest, and cleanness and smiling goodwill”. On awakening he finds his hope fulfilled. But, to complete the contrast with the “bitter war” of capitalism it is ozr-fulfilled. There is one thing lacking in “Nowhere”. “I don’t think my tales of the past interest them [the younger people] much”, says old Hammond:
“The last harvest, the last baby, the last knot of carving in the market-place, is history enough for them. It was different, I think, when I was a lad, when we were not so assured of peace and continuous plenty as we are now…”
Again, he says:
“The spirit of the new days [is] … delight in the life of the world; intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells… The unceasing criticism, the boundless curiosity in the ways and thoughts of man, which was the mood of the ancient Greek… was gone past recovery…”
The lack of eager intellectual life is not only present in “Nowhere” but is underlined. Both Hammond and Ellen sense it. The “grumbler” is introduced to point it. The narrator murmurs, “Second childhood!” and the question hangs in the air, “What is to come after this?” And Ellen’s last look seems to say: “You belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you.”
Of course Morris knew life would not be exactly like this in any real society. But the artistic method, of contrast and dream, depended upon his projecting his desires within capitalist society—his thirst for peace, for an absence of anxiety and guilt—into the future:
“Here I could enjoy everything without an afterthought of the injustice and miserable toil which made my leisure; the ignorance and dullness of life which went to make my keen appreciation of history; the tyranny and the struggle full of fear and mishap which went to make my romance.”
As A.L. Morton has written:
“Morris’s is the first Utopia which is not Utopian. In all its predecessors it is the details which catch our attention, but here, while we may be dubious about this detail or that, the important things are the sense of historical development and the human understanding of the quality of life in a classless society,”1
and, we might add, the contrasting impoverishment of life within capitalism.
Morris is not concerned with the mechanics of society but with the people—their relationships, their values, their pleasure in the details of life. And how remarkable his insights are, whether dealing with love, or labour, or communal life:
“ ‘This is the way to put it,’ said he. ‘We have been living for a hundred and fifty years, at least, more or less in our present manner, and a tradition or habit of life has been growing on us; and that habit has become a habit of acting on the whole for the best. It is easy for us to live without robbing each other. It would be possible for us to contend with and rob each other, but it would be harder for us than refraining from strife and robbery. That is in short the foundation of our life and our happiness.’ ”
VII. Personality and Influence
What kind of a man was William Morris? Scores of anecdotes surround his memory, humorous, full of honour, grave. There is the story of the first performance of Morris’s play, The Tables Turned, in the Socialist League hall in October, 1887. The play is a short topical extravaganza in two parts—the first, showing the sentencing of a Socialist agitator for obstruction, with the Archbishop of Canterbury and Tennyson called as witnesses, and ending with the invasion of the courtroom by triumphant revolutionaries; the second, dealing with the “rehabilitation” of “Justice Nupkins” in Socialist society. For the part of Tennyson, Shaw relates:
“Morris took a Socialist who happened to combine the right sort of beard with a melancholy temperament, and drilled him in a certain portentous incivility of speech which… threw a light on Morris’s opinion of Tennyson which was all the more instructive because he delighted in Tennyson’s verse…”1
The part of the Archbishop he took himself, with a shovel-hat, clerical bands, and black stockings:
“The rest he did by obliterating his humour and intelligence, and presenting his own person to the audience like a lantern with the light blown out, with a dull absorption in his own dignity which several minutes of the wildest screaming laughter… could not disturb.”
According to another witness, the tension on the eve of the first performance was unbearable. The actors were packed into the wings of the small improvised stage, and—
“His Grace of Canterbury was packed in with the rest, in a high state of excitement… due, in part probably, to the fact that this was his first appearance as actor and dramatist, and also to his having ‘delivered himself pretty straight’ to the gentleman who was assuming the character of Justice Nupkins”,
who had been taking this first night altogether too light-heartedly. The climax came, when—as Morris was making his entrance—Lord Tennyson fainted in the wings. The prompter struggled into his get-up, and Morris, aware of all that was going on, “got excited again”, forgot his own part, and (with the prompter otherwise occupied) had to improvise something in the witness-box as best he could.1
Or there is the occasion when Morris lunched with Watts-Dunton in the Cock in Fleet Street, and the conversation got onto the Elizabethan dramatists, especially Tourneur, whom Morris denounced. “That was a loudish gent a-lunching with you yesterday”, said the waiter next day to Watts-Dunton: “I thought once you was a-coming to blows”.2 Or the anecdotes of Morris’s impatience with polite social intercourse, as when a curate button-holed him and remarked, “I suppose, Mr. Morris… you have seen a good deal of poor people?”, Morris growled an assent:
“Impervious to his growing restlessness, the curate pursued his sign-song way. Finally, he asked, ‘May I ask you, Mr. Morris, have you ever sat upon a Board of Guardians?’ ‘No, thank God!’ thundered Morris…”3
Or the occasion, when Morris was being entertained to supper after giving a Socialist lecture in Leicester, and a clergyman, the Rev. J. Page Hopps remarked: “That’s an impossible dream of yours, Mr. Morris; such a Society would need God Almighty Himself to manage it.”
“Morris got up and walked round his chair, then, going across to Mr. Hopps and shaking his fist to emphasize his words, he said, ‘Well, damn it, man, you catch your God Almighty—we’ll have Him!’ ”1
Certain characteristics reappear in many stories. We know of his surprising energy. “When I talked to him”, wrote Watts-Dunton,
“of the peril of such a life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea. ‘Look at Gladstone’, he would say; ‘look to those wise owls your chancellors and your judges. Don’t they live all the longer for work? It is rust that kills men, not work.’ “2
Those who knew him well were astonished, above all, by his ability to pass rapidly from one kind of work to another, the extent and depth of his interests, and his remarkable imaginative fertility. His son-in-law, Halliday Sparling, close associate in his work both in the League and the Kelmscott Press, has left a picture of Morris in his study:
“He would be standing at an easel or sitting with a sketchbook in front of him, charcoal, brush or pencil in hand, and all the while would be grumbling Homer’s Greek under his breath… the design coming through in clear unhesitating strokes. Then the note of the grumbling changed, for the turn of the English had come. He was translating the Odyssey at this time and he would prowl about the room, filling and lighting his pipe, halting to add a touch or two at one or other easle, still grumbling, go to his writing-table, snatch up his pen, and write furiously for a while—twenty, fifty, and one hundred or more lines, as the case might be… the speed of his hand would gradually slacken, his eye would wander to an easel, a sketch-block, or to some one of the manuscripts in progress, and that would have its turn. There was something well-nigh terrifying to a youthful onlooker in the deliberate ease with which he interchanged so many forms of creative work, taking up each one exactly at the point at which he had laid it aside, and never halting to recapture the thread of his thought…”3
We are told by many witnesses of his capacity for total concentration, his almost child-like absorption in the immediate matter on hand, whether it were fishing, lecturing, or appearing as the Archbishop of Canterbury. We know of his ability to master even uncongenial work, once he had set his mind upon it. “Anyone can be a public speaker”, he once said, “if he only pegs away sufficiently at it.”1 We know of his physical impatience of restraint, his vigorous gestures, his perpetual pacing of the room,2 his irritation at the trivialities of “polite” intercourse. His acquaintance, William Sharp, summed up these characteristics well. “I never saw him at any of those literary gatherings where he might have been expected to put in an appearance”, wrote Sharp:
“His method of enjoyment was ‘to do something’, and it fretted him to sit long or listen long. Indeed, this physical impatience rendered him apparently more heedless to music, the theatre, lectures, than he really was, though when heart and brain were both under a spell, as when some speaker was urging in some new and vigorous way the claims of the people or… when a friend was reading from the manuscript of a poem… he would listen intently, leaning forward, with his vivid blue eyes gleaming out beneath his mass of upstanding and outstanding grizzled grey hair… so eagerly interested that it was possible to see the nervous life within him.”3
Beneath the bluff, self-critically humorous exterior, there persisted (says Sharp) “a curious kind of shyness” from his youthful years.
His generosity, where his sympathies were engaged, is proverbial: indeed, in his last years his feelings of guilt at his comfortable life in the midst of poverty, made him a target for imposters as well as honest men. Several of his friends relate the constant trickle of refugees to his house, whom Morris helped in a prompt and liberal manner. Over and above his unceasing assistance to the propaganda, he was often giving help privately where he could. When a comrade in the Hammersmith League hurt his leg and was unemployed, Morris privately sent him £2 a week for six months until the wound was healed: there must be a score of similar unrecorded incidents. So great was his hatred of meanness that he sometimes went too far the other way, handing over money to the movement on occasions when it should have been a point of political principle for the comrades to find the money through activity. But any flavour of “commercial” dealings pulled him up short. A sculptor once asked to borrow £10 from him to buy some marble, and tactlessly offered interest. “What?” answered Morris. “Do you think I’m a damned pawnbroker?”1
A good deal has been written of Morris’s famous “rages”. Perhaps they were not so frequent as has sometimes been supposed, since Sir Sydney Cockerel!, who was Secretary to the Kelmscott Press in Morris’s last years, witnessed only “about half a dozen of them”:
“They were startling at- the moment, but they were over in a very few minutes, and when he became calm he was like a penitent child.”2
Shaw, on the other hand, was convinced that his rages were “pathological”: they “left him shaken as men are shaken after a fit”:
“Being a great man, Morris could face and bear great trials; but on some utterly negligible provocation anything might happen, from plucking hairs out of his moustache and growling, ‘Damned fool, damned fool,’ to kicking a panel out of a door.”3
He was, says Shaw, “rich in the enormous patience of the greatest artists”, but went “unprovided with the small change of that virtue which enables cooler men to suffer fools gladly”. In open-air speaking he was at a disadvantage through his slowness at repartee when dealing with hecklers, and “the provocations and interruptions of debate… infuriated Morris, especially when they were trivial and offensive (he could bear with any serious and honest utterance like an angel); so that at last the comrades when there was a debating job to be done, put it on me…’.1 When once in one of his rages, Morris was capable of a flow of language not customarily found in the vocabulary of a Victorian gentleman; and sometimes seems to have revelled in the artistry of a row for its own sake. Surely no one but an artist could have conceived of those “Homeric passages” on the upper Thames near Kelmscott, when Morris would encounter on the water some “salaried minion” of the hated Thames Conservancy Board, and, leaning out of their punts, they would engage each other in colourful invective and defamation of character until they drifted out of earshot on the quiet reaches.2
Morris was always impatient with what he considered to be “fads”, especially when they seemed to direct the attention of comrades away from essentials in the Socialist movement. True, he was thought to be a faddist himself because of his unconventional simple blue serge suit, his refusal to dress like his class. But this was not only consistent with his whole attitude to the decorative arts:3 it was also a plain matter of convenience—he passed so rapidly from one type of work to another that he was forced to find fitting and workmanlike clothes—and almost without forethought he pioneered the saner fashions of our own century. But vegetarianism, teetotalism, “simple lifers”, had little of his sympathy. “When we are a society of equals”, he wrote, “we shall be able to consider all these niceties of life and to do what we think best.”4 When he was told that a young middle-class acquaintance had retired to the woods to lead a natural life, he only grinned and remarked: “Let us know when she comes out.”1 To any form of asceticism he was firmly opposed, as every page of News from Nowhere reveals. Simplicity did not imply deprivation of the senses, but the clearing away of a clutter of inessentials. Lecturing on “The Society of the Future”, he said:
“I demand a free and unfettered animal life for man first of all: I demand the utter extinction of all asceticism. If we feel the least degradation in being amorous, or merry, or hungry, or sleepy, we are so far bad animals, and therefore miserable men. And you know civilization does bid us to be ashamed of all these moods and deeds, and as far as she can, begs us to conceal them, and where possible to get other people to do them for us.”2
He could scarcely hide his disappointment if—after a public meeting—the comrades were all teetotal, and took him to have lemonade in some temperance hotel. “I’d like to ask you to have a drink”, he would say to such friends. “And then he would add, as in despair: ‘But you won’t drink.’ “3
With Yeats he found a congenial companion:
“I “saw him once at Hammersmith, holding up a glass of claret towards the light, and saying, ‘Why do people say it is prosaic to get inspiration out of wine? Is it not the sunlight and the sap in the leaves? Are not grapes made by the sunlight and the sap?’ “4
Morris never attempted to disguise his disgust at Victorian Grundyism, with—
“its increasing sense of the value of moral purity among those whose surroundings forbid them to understand even the meaning of physical purity; its scent of indecency in Literature and Art, which would prevent the publication of any book written out of England or before the middle of the 19th century, and would reduce painting and sculpture to the production of petticoated dolls without bodies.”1
His own life and Janey’s had, perhaps, been “unconventional”, and his experience led him to beware of dogmatizing on questions of personal and sexual morality. The Socialist movement of the ‘eighties and ‘nineties, with its sense of sudden liberation from all bourgeois conventions, was a period rife both in speculation and in unconventional practice in sexual relations; naturally there were muddles and naivities enough, but the atmosphere was healthy in so far as secretiveness and hypocrisy were replaced by open advocacy of unorthodox behaviour.
Morris did not identify himself with any “school” of thought: with Edward Carpenter, or with Joseph Lane’s Anarchist-Communist “free love”, nor did he bestow more than a chuckle upon Bax’s solemn opinion that “many generations of rational social life” in a Socialist society would “modify” and “eradicate” “the coarser side of the sexual passion… by a gradual succession of inherited changes in the human organism through the medium of its social and economic surroundings”.2 His own views were set forward in public (but not pressed) in his Notes to the League Manifesto (Appendix I, p. 740), and in Chapter IX of News from Nowhere. The test, as he saw it, lay not in “mere theological views as to chastity”, but in the happiness and fullness of life of the men and women of the future. Speaking at a League meeting in 1885 on the occasion of the Pall Mall Gazette exposures of prostitution in London he rounded upon the prurient Grundies of the Press:
“Two things are to be noticed,” he said. “First, the children of the poor are always the victims. Second, the terrible and miserable un-happiness of the whole affair. There is much talk of immorality. Whatever is unhappy is immoral. It is unhappiness that must be got rid of. We have nothing to do with the mere immorality. We have to do with the causes that have compelled this unhappy way of living… There is the closest of relations between the prostitution of the body in the streets and of the body in the workshops… We desire that all should be free to earn their livelihood—with that freedom will come an end of these monstrosities, and true love between man and woman throughout society.”1
In Socialist society, declared Note F to the Manifesto, “contracts between individuals would be voluntary and unenforced by the community”. “Fancy a court for enforcing a contract of passion or sentiment!” exclaimed old Hammond in News from Nowhere, in one of the richest chapters in that great book. While the pattern revealed in “Nowhere” is one of enduring love and friendship between two individuals, it is shown that the pattern is not uniform, and does not necessarily exclude more transient relationships (both happy and unhappy) alongside marriage. Everywhere flexibility is the keynote, in that most difficult thing to regulate, human feeling:
“There is no unvarying conventional set of rules by which people are judged; no bed of Procrustes to stretch or cramp their minds and lives; no hypocritical excommunication which people are forced to pronounce…”
Respect for authentic love, absence of deceit and constriction, are stressed:
“There need be no pretext of unity when the reality of it is gone; nor do we drive those who well know that they are incapable of it to profess an undying sentiment which they cannot really feel: thus it is that as that monstrosity of venal lust is no longer possible, so also it is no longer needed…”
Moreover, Socialism would effect a similar transformation in family relationships: “in opposition to the bourgeois view, we hold that children are persons, not property, and so have a right to claim all the advantages which the community provides for every citizen”.1 The problem, he wrote to the Reverend William Sharman, was this: “How is it possible to protect the immature citizen from the whims of his parents?” Must the child be “under the tyranny of two accidental persons? … Children… have as much need for the revolution as the proletarians have.”2 The liberation of the woman from anxiety as to the livelihood of her children would provide the necessary pre-condition for true equality in social life:
“Thus a new development of the family would take place, on the basis, not of a predetermined lifelong business arrangement, to be formally and nominally held to, irrespective of circumstances, but on mutual inclination and affection, an association terminable at the will of either party… The abhorrence of the oppression of the man by the woman or the woman by the man… will certainly be an essential outcome of the ethics of the New Society.”3
In the society of the future all persons would take part in “the domestic arts: The arrangement of a house in all its details, marketing, cleaning, cooking, baking and so on… Whoever was incapable of taking interest and a share in some parts of such work would have to be considered diseased; and the existence of many such diseased persons would tend to the enslavement of the weaker sex.”4
This was as far as Morris stated his views in public. An insight into his private views is given in a long letter to his old friend, Faulkner, of October 16th, 1886:
“My dear Charley,
“Thanks for your letter. It is right to ‘blow off’ to a friend when one is exercised. There is so much to be said on the subject of the family that I can not attempt to state the whole of my opinion, part of which of course is only mine and not necessarily doctrine. But here goes for a hurried line or two.
“Copulation is worse than beastly unless it takes place as the outcome of natural desires and kindliness on both sides: so taking place there is even something sacred about it in spite of the grotesquery of the act, as was well felt by the early peoples in their phallic worship. But further man has not been contented with leaving the matter there, mere animal on one side, inexplicably mysterious on the other; but has adorned the act variously as he has done the other grotesque act of eating and drinking, and in my opinion he will always do so. Still if he were to leave off doing so, I don’t think one ought to be shocked; there would still remain the decent animalism plus the human kindliness: that would be infinitely better than the present system of venal prostitution which is the meaning of our marriage system on its legal side; though as in other matters, in order to prevent us stinking out of existence, real society asserts itself in the teeth of authority by forming genuine unions of passion and affection.
“Clearly the present marriage system can only be kept up by the same means as the wages system is, i.e. the police & the army. When the wife can earn her living as a citizen, and the children are citizens with inalienable rights of livelihood there will be nothing to force people into legal prostitution or tempt them into irregular venal d°, which for the rest they couldn’t have, as it is simply a form of ordinary market exploitation. Husband, wife and children would all be free.
“So far as this I think all Socialists go. I should further say that the economical freedom of the family would clear away the false sentiment with which we have gilded the chain; but to my mind there would still remain abundance of real sentiment which man has evolved from the mere animal arrangement, and that this would prevent indecencies; though as to the outward form or symbol that it would take I can make no prophecies.
“Here then is in brief my views:
“1st The couple would be free.
“2 Being free, if unfortunately distaste arose between them they should make no pretence of its not having arisen.
“3 But I should hope that in most cases friendship would go along with desire, and would outlive it, and the couple would still remain together, but always as free people. In short artificial bolstering up of natural human relations is what I object to, though I admit that to make some ceremony or adornment of them is natural & human also.
“I think this is a reasonable view of the marriage question, & am prepared to defend it in public. Marson’s view,1 as far as I understand it, seems to be that once 2 people have committed themselves to one act of copulation they are to be tied together through life no matter how miserable it makes them, their children, or their children’s children. That is a superstition which I have no doubt he is sincere in holding; under our present circumstances it does not burden men of the world at all since there are plenty of whores in the market owing to our system of industrial exploitage. I think though that it weighs heavily on sensitive people endowed with real sentiment; while it degrades poor people horribly since they must wriggle out of it somehow. But if property were abolished such a view would not be very harmful; simply because it could not possibly be the general view: only those would hold it whom it suited, and public opinion would leave people free; though once more I believe that it would without violence and in some way that I cannot foresee, take care of the decencies; that it would adorn the subject in such a way as its knowledge of the great art of living would bid it.
“Well, I have written a longish letter after all but I thought it was only friendly to do so: as regards the policy of putting the matter forward, it is a ticklish subject, but one day or another we must face it. We must not forget that the present iniquity like all iniquities weighs much heavier on the working classes than on us because they are cooped together like fowls going to market.
“Please excuse haste, my dear fellow, as I am so hurried.
“Yours affectionately,
“William Morris.”1
“Our modern bourgeois property-marriage, maintained as it is by its necessary complement, universal venal prostitution, would give place to kindly and human relations between the sexes,” the Manifesto of the League proclaimed (see Appendix I). This drew a “very clever paper” from Shaw, in the form of a submission to Commonweal, which Morris, as editor, found regretfully that “we couldn’t quite endorse”:
“Of course I agree that abolishing wedlock while the present economical slavery lasts would be futile; nor do I consider a man a Socialist at all who is not prepared to admit the equality of women as far as condition goes—also that as long as women are compelled to marry for a livelihood, real marriage is a rare exception and prostitution or a kind of legalized rape the rule. I fancy we agree pretty much about the matter…”
But he could not publish Shaw’s piece without altering points which “would spoil the spirit of it.” “Before long” the League must state its views on wedlock plainly “and take the consequences which I admit are likely to be serious.” Until then the question was best left alone. It would seem that (caught between Bax’s misogyny on one hand and Lane’s demand for instant universal free love on the other) he found it difficult to “pluck up heart to explain the ambiguities of our sentence in the Manifesto.”1
On questions of religious belief, Morris was (for the sake of the movement) reticent, and rarely made any public statement of a partisan nature. When he did so, he made it clear that he did not share the views of the “Christian Socialists”, although he respected their position:
“Real (I should call it ideal) Christianity has never existed at all”, he wrote in one Commonweal controversy. “Christianity has developed in due historic sequence from the first, and has taken the various forms which social, political economic circumstances have forced on it; its last form moulded by the sordid commercialism of modern capitalism being the bundle of hypocrisies which… Christian Socialists condemn. When this beggarly period has been supplanted by one in which Socialism is realized, will not the system of morality, the theory of life, be all-embracing, and can it be other than the Socialist theory? Where then will be the Christian ethic?—absorbed in Socialism. No separate system of ethics will then be needed…”2
In private conversation he drove home the fact that organized religion was one of the strongest pillars of capitalist orthodoxy. “One night”, recalled his acquaintance, Harry Lowerison,
“Shaw, Belfort Bax and I were chatting after a lecture in the old shed in the Mall. The churches were just then a little more intolerant and reactionary than usual, and I got angry and was damning them in good set terms, when I was surprised to hear Bax, of all men, say: ‘You’re flogging a very dead horse, Lowerison.’ Morris had come up behind me, and he met Bax on the rebound with: ‘Dead! the church! you mind its hoofs, Bax, and its teeth; neither end is safe.’ 1
This account of his breach with the orthodoxies of Victorian morality will help us to understand the importance of his personal example in his breach with the even greater orthodoxy of class. True, Edward Carpenter and others had familiarized themselves with certain aspects of working-class life; while, at the time of the Dock Strike, middle-class “slumming” was almost respectable. But these facts re-emphasize how firmly demarked the social classes were at the end of the nineteenth century—revealing themselves not only in the class outlook of those who observed every social distinction, but also in the self-consciousness of those who deliberately ignored them. The attitude of middle-class men and women (including many of those who joined the Socialist ranks) to the working class was vitiated by half-conscious feelings—of fear, of guilt, of patronage, of contempt. In Cobden-Sanderson’s Journal there are passages which reveal the great gulf dividing the workers from some of Morris’s friends on the artistic edge of the movement:
“I am sitting at the small table in the bow window… hot bright sunshine on the world outside. I am going to give an hour or two to Hyndman’s Historical Basis of Socialism. Annie darling is outside sitting under the shade of a tree reading. Blue-bottles are buzzing, and white-winged butterflies flit by… Through the open window… I look upon a wicket beyond, surmounted with jassamine… The wind flutters in the trees and blows refreshingly in gusts upon my cheeks. What a day! What a time! What perfection of quiet and happiness. How the world is beautiful! And now to the contrast offered in the pages of Hyndman, ‘The Present Position of the City Workers’… It is too horrible. It is cryingly miserable. And yet here it is in tranquil print… Why do not the poor get up and cut the throats of all of us?”2
Why not, indeed? Or, at another extreme, regard the animal fear of Gissing, caught off” his guard in Workers in the Dawn:
“O, what a hell could I depict in the Whitecross Street of this Christmas Eve! Out of the very depths of human depravity bubbled up the foulest miasmata which the rottenness of the human heart can breed, usurping the dominion of the pure air of heaven, stifling a whole city with their infernal reek.”
Then, as now, there were middle-class men and women to whom Socialism was a form of Charity Organization Society, or a passing adventure of an exhibitionist kind. There is no shade of this in Morris’s attitude. On certain points of principle he broke deliberately with the customs of his class. “My dear”, he wrote guiltily to one of his earnest young daughters, in 1888, “to confess and be hanged I went 2nd class to Kelmscott with your mother: we did not like to be scrowdged”1 —revealing in this passing manner that he (and the unhappy Jane) had been in the custom of travelling third class on their way to Kelmscott. But, in general, Morris’s attitude to the working class was unselfconscious and free of inhibitions. He had a greater respect for craftsmanship than he had for academic learning, and he always felt that his own craftsmanship joined him to the working people. Despite certain failures in communication, he always succeeded in impressing any working-class gathering which he addressed with his honesty of purpose. “So convinced was he of the utility of open-air propaganda”, recalled Frank Kitz,
“that he stood by my side on many a windy, inclement night at the corner of some wretched East-End slum whilst I endeavoured to gain him an audience… He had no feeling of contempt for those who do the rough work of the movement… Although his audience were at first somewhat mystified by his method of delivering his message, for he was no great orator, they gradually grasped his meaning: and as he preached to those toil-worn crowds in the gloomy East-End byways… he would warm to his subject, and his audience would enter into the spirit of his address.”1
His comradeship in the “Cause” was a source of enrichment to many lives. Wilfred Scawen Blunt was astonished to find that Morris regarded women with the respect of equality:
“He was the only man I ever came in contact with who seemed absolutely independent of sex considerations. He would talk in precisely the same tone to a pretty woman as to a journeyman carpenter-that is to say, he would be interested if she had anything interesting to tell him, but not for a minute longer.” 2
With the comrades he was careful not to impose his views by force of his personal authority. Bruce Glasier’s book of reminiscences is full of accounts of Morris’s unselfconscious part in the casual comradeship of the movement. The same note recurs in many reminiscences. John Bedford Leno, the veteran Chartist poet, attended a lecture at Hammersmith, and was warmly welcomed by Morris: he later recalled with joy “this oasis in the desert of an old man’s life.”3 Alf. Mattison, the Leeds engineer and historian of the movement, cherished as a “priceless possession” his memory of calling at Kelmscott House in 1892. After Morris had paced with him up and down the garden, interrogating him on the movement in the North, he stayed to supper after the Sunday lecture:
“What a pleasant time we had! There was Morris at the head of the table; May Morris at my side, and about six or eight more comrades. Morris was in a hearty and jovial mood… Tales were told and songs were sung… Often since that time, when the Social outlook was depressing and hope seemed fled, I have recalled that happy occasion, and under his manifold inspirations have again taken the road to Socialism—the earthly paradise of the toiling millions.”4
For many comrades, these famous Sunday suppers seemed to open new windows on the wealth of life. One Hammersmith Leaguer recorded:
“We first discussed a Socialist colony, and Morris went into every detail, with such zeal that he made us think it a project dear to his heart. He talked about the upper reaches of the Thames and about salmon fishing, about his country house, ‘Kelmscott’, about the folklore… and some of the doings when feasts used to take place inside the churches…”1
Nor should we forget the conscious efforts made by Morris to instill this spirit of comradeship into the movement, and to enrich the day-to-day struggle with an eager cultural life. “It was William Morris’s great hope”, wrote Edward Carpenter:
“that these branches growing and spreading, would before long ‘reach hands’ to each other and form a network over the land—would constitute in fact ‘the New Society’ within the framework of the old.”2
Sometimes he described this spirit as the “Religion of Socialism”:
“It has been seen over and over how a religion, a principle—whatever you may chose to call it—will transform poltroons into heroes, by forcing men to make the best of their better qualities, and making the excess of what they have got in them that is good, supply the defects of their lacking qualities… Let us remember that the Religion of Socialism… calls upon us to be better than other people, since we owe ourselves to the Society which we have accepted as the hope of the future.”3
Here, then, are some aspects of the personality—humorous, brusque, shy, meditative, vehement by turns—which so strongly impressed all who knew him, and which has left its permanent stamp upon the Socialist movement. So far from giving the impression of the “dreaming idealist”, the impression gained by acquaintances was often the reverse. Margaret McMillan recalled his conversation:
“He talked nearly all the time about material things, not theories or speculations, but concrete things, and failing these, news of the doings in the party. He had nothing of Hyndman’s fire and storm, nothing of Hardie’s mysticism. It seemed as if you could put his information in your pocket.”1
Perhaps if there is a dominant trait it is one of deep seriousness, combined with a total absence of affectation, a constant struggle to find the most direct honesty of expression. In one of his earlier lectures he said:
“It is good for a man who thinks seriously to face his fellows, and speak out whatever really burns in him, so that men may seem less strange to one another…”2
This is the prevailing note of his whole life. But we should beware of painting his character in black and white. “I’m a lonely chap”, he once remarked, and the words recall sharply the turbulence of his romantic revolt, the arduous conflict of his middle years, the failure in his personal life, his intellectual isolation at the dawn of modern Socialism, the stresses beneath the surface of his final years of action. The French critic, Gabriel Mourey, was struck by his “strange face”—
“Fierce, and yet at the same time overflowing with gentleness… the undecided brusquerie of the shy, the reserve of a man filled with his own thoughts and self-contained, but with sudden fits of bonhomie and gusts of enthusiasm which all at once fire, exalt, and transfigure him.”3
While Morris’s acquaintance, Stopford Brooke, who knew him over twenty-five years, declared:
“His life was a wonder of work and pursuit and of intensity. His character… is a strange study, extraordinarily heterogeneous. People think it simple; it was amazingly complex…”1
Perhaps the truth is twofold. His character was amazingly complex in the strange blend of the romantic and realist, in the fires of conflict through which he had passed and which still flickered within him to the end. But in the integration of his life, the splendid unity of aspiration and action of his later years, there is the simplicity of greatness. It was this simplicity which held so much influence over his contemporaries, and drew tributes from men so diverse as Tom Mann:
“He was to me the outstanding man among the intellectuals of the time, with a personality of so distinguished and commanding a type that I felt it a privilege to be identified with the same movement that held out such a glorious hope to the workers of the world…”2
As W.B. Yeats, in the deep romanticism of his early period:
“He may not have been, indeed he was not, among the very greatest of poets, but he was among the greatest of those who prepare the last reconciliation when the Cross shall blossom with roses.”3
And as George Bernard Shaw, at the end of his life:
“With such wisdom as my years have left me I note that as he has drawn further and further away from the hurlyburly of our personal contacts into the impersonal perspective of history he towers greater and greater above the horizon beneath which his best advertised contemporaries have disappeared.”4
And, in so writing, he proved the truth of his words written forty years before, in the week when Morris was buried: “You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his.”1
VIII. Desire and Necessity
What was the source of the greatness of Morris—this growing stature which he assumes in the perspective of history? His poetry alone, or his work in the decorative arts—profound though its influence was—would hardly be sufficient to establish his claim to the universal greatness suggested by Shaw. As a political organizer his efforts ended in failure. As a theorist of the arts—despite all his profound insight—he failed to construct a consistent system, and muddled his way around some central problems. Did he make any major contribution which is marked by the stamp of unquestionable originality and excellence?
The answer must be, “Yes”. Morris’s claim to greatness must be founded, not on any single contribution to English culture, but on the quality which unites and informs every aspect of his life and work. This quality might best be described as “moral realism”: it is the practical moral example of his life which wins admiration, the profound moral insight of his political and artistic writings which gives them life. A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere, those two richly imaginative moralities, seem the most natural and fitting expression of his artistic genius.
Morris never sought to disguise the leading part which moral considerations played in the formation of his outlook, and in guiding his actions. He was brought to Socialism by his conscious revolt against that mechanical materialism which reduced the story of mankind to an objectless record of struggle for the survival of the “fittest”, and which, in his own time, under whatever high-sounding phrases, put profit and not “free and full life” as the touchstone of value. He declared, by contrast: “I am a sentimentalist in all the affairs of life, and I am proud of the title.”1 “I must tell you that my special leading motive as a Socialist is hatred of civilization; my ideal of the new Society would not be satisfied unless that Society destroyed civilization.”2 His ever-ready response to the possibilities of life, his capacity for indignation at its impoverishment in “civilized” capitalist society, was limitless. Unlike those late romantic poets who revolted once in their youth, and slumbered thereafter for years, he was in continuous volcanic eruption. Here he is writing his Commonweal “Notes”, and catches sight of a sordid incident of Imperialism:
“What now? Who is the civilized English Government copying now?—Genghis Khan or Tamerland? Scarcely even these; for these destroyers had their ideas stirred and their blood heated by the atmopshere of personal war and violence in which they lived, and at worst they were no hypocrites. But our black-coated, smug-visaged, dinner-party-giving, go-to-church ‘scourges of God’ who have not even the spirit to plead for themselves that they are curses and must act after their kind, who can one liken them to? For the sake of what one cannot even call a whim—for the sake of one knows not what, they must slaughter a number of innocent persons whom they are pleased to call ‘the enemy…’ “3
“Bah! the man of modern civilization is a sickening animal to contemplate”, he breaks out on another occasion, after describing a British shooting-party in an Egyptian village.4 General Gordon, “martyr”, of the Sudan, is placed in a phrase—“that most dangerous tool of capitalist oppression, the ‘God-fearing soldier’.”5 “One paper says that this task of civilizing Africa is well worthy of Modern Christianity. Surely that is undeniable. Tom Turnpenny never had a better job offered to him; 20 per cent, and the Gospel…are tempting indeed.”6 And so the sordid climax of capitalist “progress” is put in the perspective of history:
“O lame and impotent conclusion of that Manchester school which has filled the world with the praises of its inventiveness, its energy, its love of peace! Strange that the new Attila, the new Genghis Khan, the modern scourge of God, should be destined to stalk through the world in the gentlemanly broadcloth of a Quaker manufacturer!”1
Or here we have his attention caught by such a trivial incident as we might read in the Press every day of our lives. Notice how the whole of capitalist society, its legal code, its sense of values, is present in his mind as he comments on the incident:
“A citizen complained of a nuisance, in the form of a stink, in a police-court the other day, and the whole subject was thought to be very funny, the magistrate… leading off the laughter. We cannot tell… what the merits of this particular case might be; but we do know that a neighbourhood may be stunk out without a legal nuisance being established, which is indeed ridiculous enough, though not more ridiculous than most of our law. Perhaps the magistrate and his audience were laughing at English law in general. Or perhaps they thought it a preposterous joke that a well-to-do citizen should make a fuss about commerce annoying him with a mere stink when it murders so many poor people day by day. No doubt this is a joke, but I can’t laugh at it. There is another explanation, which is that these laughers were such dullards that they had no conception that people might possibly restrain commerce so as to allow people to live decent lives. That also is no laughing matter.”2
And so, in these casual passing notes, he revealed his astonishing insight into the self-destructive progress of captalism in its final years:
“International Capitalism and the workman a hungry machine; International Socialism and the workman a free man and the master of his own destiny—it must be one or other of these two. All the feeble compromises… will be speedily found out… by the monster which the Age of Commerce has made by dint of such mighty effort and cleverness, and which it must now feed by anything that may be handy. Honour, justice, beauty, pleasure, hope, all must be cast into that insatiable maw to stave off the end awhile; and yet at last the end must come…”
Morris had seen into the heart of “the Bourgeois” and had found within it the negation of life. On one side was the comfortable hypocrisy:
“In the naivest and most unconscious way the one standard of good or… evil, of better or worse, is the comfort and morals of the Middle-class… They very naturally therefore are always fairly contented with the world as it is especially since most of them look forward to another Bourgeois world beyond…”1
On the other hand, his writings are full of forecasts of the recklessness of individualism grown desperate when its end is near. In a striking image he suggested that Albert Diirer’s “Knight and Death” (a favourite of his youth) might serve as “a figurement of the doom of Blood and Iron in our own day”, and of—
“the armed bourgeoisie… which to-day owns all that is made and all that makes, and which after a long period of that confidence of living for ever, which is the natural gift of youth and manhood, is now entering the valley of the shadow of death, and has become conscious of its coming defeat, and of the companions it has made for itself, and so rides on warily and fearfully, Crime behind it, Death before it.”2
And yet there was hope in this as well, for—
“happily it always happens… in revolutions [that] the nearer the time comes for the defeat of reaction… the more the courage of the reactionists fails them, because they begin to be conscious that their cause has become a mere mass of found-out lies and helpless hypocrisies.”3
This is, indeed the prevailing note of Morris’s later actions and writings—the appeal to the moral consciousness as a vital agency of social change. It is unlikely that Morris ever read The Origin of the Family, Anti-Duhring or Ludwig Feuerbach, although he may have learned something of their theme from Bax, and he would have encountered their central ideas in Capital The understanding that in the fight for Socialism the age-old contradiction between the unfolding possibilities of life and their negation by class oppression, between aspiration and actuality, was at last ended; or, if not ended, at last transmuted into the contradiction between man’s boundless desire and the necessary limitations imposed by his environment and nature; this came upon him with the force of an independent discovery. The whole face of the world was changed for him by this new understanding. This discovery appeared to him to give a new meaning and dignity to man’s whole story. The Marxist interpretation of history made possible a great access of sympathy with the struggles of men in past times, which need no longer be viewed as a series of haphazard accidents:
“We see that the world of Europe [in the Middle Ages] was no more running round in a circle then than now, but was developing, sometimes with stupendous speed, into something as different from itself as the age which succeeds this will be different from that wherein we live. The men of those times are no longer puzzles to us, we can understand their aspirations, and sympathise with their lives, while at the same time we have no wish (not to say hope) to put back the clock… For indeed it is characteristic of the times in which we live, that, whereas, in the beginning of the romantic reaction, its supporters were for the most part mere laudatores temporis acti [praisers of past times]: at the present time those who take pleasure in studying the life of the past are more commonly to be found in the ranks of those who are pledged to the forward movement of modern life: while those who are vainly striving to stem the progress of the world are as careless of the past as they are fearful of the future. In short, history, the new sense of modern times, the great compensation for the losses of the centuries, is now teaching us worthily, and making us feel that the past is not dead, but is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make…” 1
This passage takes us directly to the central theme of A Dream of John Ball. Here, in those magnificent last scenes in the Church, with the dead from the day’s battle, friend and foe, lying beside him,
“I… pondered how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”
Here is Morris’s reflection, from the standpoint of aspiration, upon man’s unmastered history. It is paralleled in a passage of Engels’s Ludwig Feuerbach, first published in the same year:
“In spite of the consciously desired aims of all individuals, accident apparently reigns on the surface. That which is-willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realization or the means of attaining them are insufficient… The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended.”
Morris declared that his main intention in writing A Dream had been in the dialogue of the concluding chapters,2 and the problem debated here is whether “John Ball’s” struggle and death is not a mockery in the light of the centuries of capitalism to come. The answer is two-fold: first, “John Ball”, symbol of the oppressed struggling for objectives unattainable within the determined course of history, has no alternative; he can only achieve the dignity of manhood by rebellion—“to strive was my pleasure and my life”. Second, his rebellion is given deeper meaning by its foreshadowed consummation in “The Change Beyond the Change”, in which his aspirations, and those of the nameless millions he represents, will at length be fulfilled, in that day-dawn which may be “cold and grey and surly”:
“And yet by its light shall men see things as they verily are, and no longer enchanted by the gleam of the moon and the glamour of the dreamtide. By such grey light shall wise men and valiant souls see the remedy, and deal with it, a real thing that may be touched and handled, and no glory of the heavens to be worshipped from afar off… The time shall come, John Ball, when that dream of thine that this shall one day be, shall be a thing that men shall talk of soberly, and as a thing soon to come about…”
Morris did not exalt the primacy of moral factors as agents of revolutionary change:
“No amount of preaching, of enthusiasm, or of devotion even, will induce the workers, with whom the world’s future lies, to accept and to act upon mere abstract propositions of what they have a right to aspire to; necessity must push them on before they can even conceive of the future of equality and mutual good-will which we KNOW awaits them… Necessity only can make them conscious of this struggle.”1
But, nevertheless, he laid the greatest stress upon their agency. “Necessity” alone would impell spontaneous riot and class-struggle, wasteful and uncertain of success:
“If the present state of society merely breaks up without a conscious effort at transformation, the end, the fall of Europe, may be long in coming, but when it does, it will be far more terrible, far more confused and full of suffering than the period of the fall of Rome.”2
And conscious effort implied not only clear theoretical understanding but also hatred for the present and love for the future. Speaking of “the two great forces which rule the world, Necessity and Morality”, he declared, “if we give it all up into the hands of necessity, Society will explode volcanically with such a crash as the world has not yet witnessed.”1
“I am not going into argument on the matter of free will and predestination; I am only going to assert that if individual men are the creatures of their surrounding conditions, as indeed I think they are, it must be the business of man as a social animal, or of Society, if you will, to make the surroundings which make the individual man what he is. Man must and does create the conditions under which he lives; let him be conscious of that, and create them wisely.”2
“Necessity”, on the one hand, he wrote, was hastening the crisis by the increasing tendency towards monopoly, and by forcing the workers into closer combination—
“and on the other hand morality, her eyes cleared by the advance of necessity, is beginning to remember the ancient legend of the first murderer, and the terrible answer to his vile sneer, Am I my brother’s keeper?”3
“Her eyes cleared by the advance of necessity”—could there be a more dialectical expression of the interrelation between “desire” and “necessity” than this? And so to the magnificent recognition of what victory will mean:
“If we live to see the day when that slavery receives its death wound we shall regret no labour or pain that we have spent in the cause; no men that have ever lived will have been so happy as we shall be.”4
Morris was not a mere muddle-headed convert to Marxism. He was a creative and original thinker, whose best work falls within the Marxist tradition. He understood that the consummation of his own romantic aspirations in the Socialist cause symbolized a historical consummation of vast significance. Socialism, he saw,
“is not a change for the sake of change, but a change involving the very noblest ideal of human life and duty: a life in which every human being should find unrestricted scope for his best powers and faculties.”
All his Socialist writings returned to this point. Moreover, he actively resented the suggestion that the perception of the artist, the moral criticism of society, was irrelevant to “Scientific Socialism”. In an important Commonweal article he criticized the attitude of such “one-sided Socialists”:
“They do not see except through the murky smoked glass of the present condition of life amongst us; and it seems somewhat strange not that they should have no vision of the future, but that they should not be ready to admit that it is their own defect that they have not. Surely they must allow that such a stupendous change in the machinery of life as the abolition of capital and wages must bring about a corresponding change in ethics and habits of life… Is it conceivable, for instance, that the change for the present wage-earners will simply mean hoisting them up into the life of the present ‘refined’ middle-classes?… What! will… the family of the times when monopoly is dead be still as it is now in the middle-classes, framed on the model of an affectionate and moral tiger to whom all is prey a few yards from the sanctity of the domestic hearth? Will the body of the woman we love be but an appendage to her property? Shall we try to cram our lightest whim as a holy dogma into our children, and be bitterly unhappy when we find that they are growing up to be men and women like ourselves? Will education be a system of cram begun on us when we are four years old, and left off sharply when we are eighteen? Shall we be ashamed of our love and our hunger and our mirth, and believe that it is wicked of us not to try to dispense with the joys that accompany procreation of our species, and the keeping of ourselves alive, those joys of desire which make us understand that the beasts too may be happy? Shall we all, in short, as the ‘refined’ middle classes now do, wear ourselves away in the anxiety to stave off all trouble, and emotion, and responsibility, in order that we may at last merge all our troubles into one, the trouble that we have been born for nothing but to be afraid to die?”
And he concluded:
“I hold that we need not be afraid of scaring our audiences with too brilliant pictures of the future of Society, nor think ourselves unpractical and Utopian for telling them the bare truth, that in destroying monopoly we shall destroy our present civilization… If you tell your audiences that you are going to change so little that they will scarcely feel the change, whether you scare anyone or not, you will certainly not interest those who have nothing to hope for in the present Society, and whom the hope of a change has attracted towards Socialism… And certainly the Socialists who are always preaching to people that Socialism is an economic change pure and simple, are very apt to repel those who want to learn for the sake of those who do not.”1
Conversely, this was the compelling reason why Fabianism, Reformism, “semi-demi-Socialism” held no attractions for him whatsoever. Shaw got hold of a part of the truth when he attempted to answer the question, “Why did Morris not join the Fabians?”:
“The answer is that he would have been more out of place in our drawingrooms than in any gang of manual labourers or craftsmen. The furniture would have driven him mad; and the discussion would have ended in his dashing out of the room in a rage, and damning us all for a parcel of half baked shortsighted suburban snobs, as ugly in our ideas as in our lives. He could be patient with the strivings of ignorance and poverty towards the light if the striver had the reality that comes from hard work on tough materials with dirty hands, and weekly struggles with exploitation and oppression; but the sophistications of middle-class minds hurt him physically. He had made his way through much opposition and ridicule; and he was a wise and great man sub specie eternitas; but he was an ungovernable man in a drawingroom…”2
By temperament Morris had not the least interest in “politics”. He was interested in “free and full life and the consciousness of life”.1 He was in uncompromising rebellion against the shadow life of the Victorian middle class—its cant of individualism, “that unceasing cry of the bore and the dullard”,2 its orthodox religion, its Grundyism, its callous brutality. Morris, alas, would not have rested content with the “Welfare State”: when the “ideal” was set before him of “the capitalist public service… brought to perfection”, he merely remarked that he “would not walk across the street for the realization of such an ‘ideal’ “.3 And even if he had been told of the final overthrow of Marx’s theories by several generations of university professors, he would still have excused himself from changing his opinions. “Even supposing I did not understand that there is a definite reason in economics, and that the whole system can be changed”, he had told the Northumberland miners in 1887, “I for one would be a rebel against it.”
William Morris was the first creative artist of major stature in the world to take his stand, consciously and without shadow of compromise, with the revolutionary working class: to participate in the day-to-day work of building the Socialist movement: to put his brain and his genius at its disposal in the struggle.
It is no small matter for a man of fifty, in the face of the ridicule of society, the indifference of wife and friends, to set aside the work he loves and fashion his life anew. But this was what Morris did:
“To have breasted the Spanish pikes at Leyden, to have drawn sword with Oliver: that may well seem at times amidst the tangles of to-day a happy fate: for a man to be able to say, I have lived like a fool, but now I will cast away fooling for an hour, and die like a man—there is something in that certainly: and yet ‘tis clear that few men can be so lucky as to die for a cause, without first of all having lived for it. And as this is the most that can be asked from the greatest man that follows a cause, so it is the least that can be taken from the smallest.”1
His was the steady enduring courage of the realist, which upheld him in all the drudgery, committee wrangling and trivial duties of the movement.
Morris will always occupy a position of unique importance in the British revolutionary tradition. Some part of his work remains of international significance: News from Nowhere has crossed many national boundaries: and the significance of his Utopian realism is gaining increasing international recognition.2 But Morris’s strength, no less than the strength of Gramsci, draws deeply upon the strengths of a more local intellectual tradition. The Romantic critique of industrial capitalism, the work of Ruskin and of Carlyle, assumes a new kind of significance in the light of Morris’s transformation of the tradition.3
Moreover, for all the universality of his interests, Morris’s genius was peculiarly English in its most characteristic expressions:
“The land is a little land; too much shut up within the narrow seas as it seems, to have much space for swelling into hugeness: there are no great wastes overwhelming in their dreariness, no great solitudes of forests, no terrible untrodden mountain-walls: all is measured, mingled, varied, gliding easily one thing into another: little rivers, little plains, swelling, speedily-changing uplands, all beset with handsome orderly trees; little hills, little mountains, netted over with the walls of sheep-walks: all is little; yet not foolish and blank, but serious rather, and abundant of meaning for such as choose to seek it: it is neither prison nor palace, but a decent home…
“Some people praise this homeliness overmuch, as if the land were the very axle-tree of the world; so do not I… yet when we think what a small part of the world’s history, past, present, and to come, is this land we live in, and how much smaller still in the history of the arts, and yet how our forefathers clung to it, and with what care and pains they adorned it, this unromantic, uneventful-looking land of England, surely by this too our hearts may be touched, and our hope quickened.”1
“The movement is going on in all civilized countries”, he wrote to one correspondent, “some of which are riper for the change than England is. England’s adhesion would put the coping stone on the New Society.”2 If there is a trace of chauvinism here (and Wales and Scotland had a movement “going on” at least as vigorous as England’s), he extended the same respect to the national traditions of others. The society of the future he saw not as a rupture of all continuities but as a resolution of past contradictions: it must grow out of the older positives in human labour, art and sociability.
“Intelligence enough to conceive, courage enough to will, power enough to compel. If our ideas of a new Society are anything more than a dream, these three qualities must animate the due effective majority of the working-people; and then, I say, the thing will be done.”3
The power is the power of the organized working class. The intelligence is their revolutionary theory, Marxism. The courage—that is a moral quality. And it is here, above all, that we need William Morris to-day. “Think of it a little!” he exclaimed in one of his lectures on Communism:
“What amount of wealth we should produce if we are all working cheerfully at producing the things that we all genuinely want; if all the intelligence, all the inventive power, all the inherited skill of handicraft, all the keen wit and insight, all the healthy bodily strength were engaged in doing this and nothing else, what a pile of wealth we should have! How would poverty be a word whose meaning we should have forgotten! Believe me, there is nothing but the curse of inequality which forbids this.”1
So he still paces ahead of us, no longer “lonely” but still in the van—beckoning us forward to the measureless bounty of life. He is one of those men whom history will never overtake.
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1 “The Beauty of Life”, Works, XXII, pp. 73–4.
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1 “Art Under Plutocracy”, ibid., pp. 165–6.
2 “Useful Work versus Useless Toil”, Signs of Change, p. 144.
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1 Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (1949), p. 93.
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1 May Morris, I, p. 189.
2 “The Art of the People”, Works, XXII, pp. 31–2.
3 “The Hopes of Civilization”, Signs of Change, p. 86.
4 Commonweal, May Supplement, 1885.
5 Signs of Change, pp. 86 f.
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1 Commonweal, June Supplement, 1885.
2 Ibid,, May Supplement, 1885.
3 Ibid., May Supplement, 1885.
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1 See May Morris, II, pp. 629–30,1, p. 281; Works, XXII, pp. 56, 389.
2 “The Socialist Idea in Art”, Works, XXIII, p. 255.
3 “Makeshift”, May Morris, II, p. 474.
4 Ibid, p. 475.
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1 “Useful Work versus Useless Toil”, Signs of Change, p. 141.
2 “Making the Best of It”, Works, XXII, p. 115.
3 “Art under Plutocracy”, ibid, XXIII, p. 173.
4 “Art and Socialism”, ibid, p. 205.
5 “The Art of the People”, ibid, XXII, p. 47.
6 “Art and Socialism”, ibid, XXIII, p. 194.
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1 “The Aims of Art”, Signs of Change, p. 134.
2 Commonweal, February 25th, 1887.
3 Ibid, July 10th, 1886.
4 “The Lesser Arts”, Works, XXII, p. 25.
5 “The Beauty of Life”, ibid, p. 76 f.
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1 “Art and Socialism”, Works, XXII, p. 210.
2 “A Factory as It Might Be”, May Morris, II, p. 136 f.
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1 “Useful Work versus Useless Toil”, Signs of Change, p. 169.
2 “A Factory as It Might Be”, May Morris, II, pp. 136 f.
3 “Art and Its Producers”, Works, XXII, p. 352.
4 Lecture at Oldham on “The Depression in Trade” (1885), Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45334; E.D. Lemire, Unpublished Lectures of William Morris, pp. 129–30.
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1 “As to Bribing Excellence”, Liberty, May, 1895.
2 “Useful Work versus Useless Toil”, Signs of Change, p. 166.
3 “A Factory as It Might Be”, May Morris, II, p. 137.
4 Ibid
5 “How We Live and How We Might Live”, Signs of Change, p. 27.
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1 “Why Not?”, Justice, April 12th, 1884.
2 Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, p. 316.
3 “A Factory as It Might Be”, May Morris, II, pp. 137 f.
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1 Lecture, “What Is: What Should be: What Will Be” (1893?). “The most obvious way of using machinery… would seem to be to use it for the prevention of drudgery and not otherwise… I have a kind of an idea that the time will come when people will rather overdo their hatred of machinery, as perhaps I do now.” Brit Mus. Add. MSS. 45330.
2 “Art and Beauty of the Earth”, Works, XXII, p. 166.
3 Review of Looking Backward, Commonweal, June 22nd, 1889.
4 Letter to Comrade Blackwell, ibid., May 18th, 1889.
5 “How We Live and How We Might Live”, Signs of Change, p. 33.
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1“The Aims of Art”, Signs of Change, pp. 132 f.
2 Letters, p. 206.
3 This appears to have been Morris’s view in his last years. See, for example, his article in Liberty, February, 1894, “Why I am a Communist”: “A Communal Society would bring about a condition of things in which we should be really wealthy, because we should have all we produced, and should know what we wanted to produce; that we should have so much leisure from the production of what are called ‘utilities’, that any group of people would have leisure to satisfy its cravings for what are usually looked on as superfluities, such as works of art, research into facts, literature, the unspoiled beauty of nature; matters that to my mind are utilities also…”
4 See “The Aims of Art”, Signs of Change, p. 136; May Morris, II, p. 462.
5 “The Society of the Future”, May Morris, p. 466.
6 Brit Mus. Add. MSS. 45330.
7 Observer, November 6th, 1949.
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1 See Commonweal May Supplement, 1885: “For my part, having regard to the general happiness of the race, I say without shrinking that the bloodiest of violent revolutions would be a light price to pay for the righting of this wrong.”
2 Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, pp. 301–2.
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1 May Morris, II, p. 168, and Works, XXII, p. 151.
2 Commonweal, April Supplement, 1885.
3 May Morris, II, p. 408.
4 Ibid, I, pp. 266–7.
5 “The Aims of Art”, Signs of Change, p. 140.
6 “Some Hints on Pattern-designing”, Works, XXII, p. 176.
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1 “The Lesser Arts of Life”, Works, XXII, pp. 235–6.
2 “The Deeper Meaning of the Struggle,” Letters, pp. 355–7.
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1 See May Morris, I, p. 305, Lecture on “The English Pre-Raphaelites”, where he argues that the artist’s imagination must naturally take “the raiment of some period in which the surroundings of life were not ugly but beautiful.”
2 Ibid, pp. 239–40.
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1 “Art and Industry in the Fourteenth Century”, Works, XXII, p. 389.
2 “The Beauty of Life”, ibid., p. 56.
3 May Morris, II, p. 631.
4 “Feudal England”, Signs of Change, p. 73.
5 May Morris, II, p. xxxiii.
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1 See May Morris’s Introduction to Works, XXII.
2 See Commonweal, August 25th, 1888.
3 Ibid., June 22nd, 1889.
4 Ibid., December 15th, 1888.
5 May Morris, I, p. 243.
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1 Letters, p. 85.
2 See Letters, p. 280. Morris, writing to Geòrgie Bume-Jones, comments on his reading of War and Peace, and is clearly comparing it in his mind with Stepniak’s tales of tHe Russian nihilists and revolutionaries: “There seems to be a concensus of opinion in these Russian novels as to the curious, undecided turn of the intellectual persons there: Hamlet… should have been a Russian, not a Dane. This throws some light on the determination and straightforwardness of the revolutionary heroes and heroines there; as if they said, ‘Russians must be always shilly-shally, letting I dare wait upon I would, must they? Look here then, we will throw all that aside and walk straight to death.” See Sergius Stepniak, Underground Russia.
3 See Shaw’s Introduction to May Morris, II, and Observer, November 6th, 1949.
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1 “The Beauty of Life “, Works, XXII, p. 55.
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1 “Art and the Beauty of the Earth”, Works, XXII, p. 164.
2 May Morris, II, p. 203.
3 “The Lesser Arts”, Works, XXII, pp. 9–11.
4 “The Beauty of Life”, ibid, p. 65.
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1 “The Aims of Art”, Signs of Change, p. 134.
2 Ibid., p. 140.
3 Ibid., p. 133.
4 Commonweal, April Supplement, 1885.
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1 Letters, pp. 355–7 (November 10th, 1893). This important letter, “The Deeper Meaning of the Struggle”, addressed to the Daily Chronicle, was later rejprinted as a handbill by the Hammersmith Socialist Society.
2 “How I Became a Socialist”, Justice, June 6th, 1894.
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1 “The English Pre-Raphaelite School”, May Morris, I, pp. 307–8.
2 Commonweal, April Supplement, 1885.
3 “The Exhibition of the Royal Academy”, May Morris, I, p. 241 (from To-day, July, 1884).
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1 Letters, pp. 158–9.
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1 F.W. Jowett, What Made Me a Socialist (n.d.).
2 See May Morris, I, p. 200: “True, we have all of us heard discussions as to whether art should be for art’s sake, should itself be its own end, or be done for a purpose—most fruitless discussions they are, I must say, mere confusion of words. You may be sure both that a real artist does his work because he likes it, and that when done ‘tis a blessing to his fellows… Every work of art is both a good thing in itself though nobody sees it, and if seen will influence the minds and lives of men, and lead to other things scarce guessed at by those who wrought it.”
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1 See Buxton-Forman, The Books of William Morris (1897): “I could not persuade its author to reprint it; he considered it wanted more revision than he could give it at the time.”
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1 Letters, p. 338.
2 First edition, p. 879.
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1 William Sharp in The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1896.
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1 May Morris, II, p. xxxviii.
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1 “The Deeper Meaning of the Struggle”, Letters, p. 357.
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1 Letters, p. 302; Morris discussed the values of the tribal “kindred” in “The Development of Modern Society”, Commonweal, July 19th, 1890.
2 H.H. Sparling, The Kelmscott Press and William Morris, Master-Craftsman, p. 50, recounts that when a German archaeologist wrote to Morris asking him what new sources of information he had used in writing The House of the Wolfings, Morris exclaimed: “Doesn’t the fool realize… that it’s a romance, a work of fiction-that it’s all LIES!”
3 Morris’s hatred for the Roman Empire found frequent expression; e.g. Letters p. 265; Commonweal, May, 1886 (“Socialism from the Root Up”, I).
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1 Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, p. 21.
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1 May Morris’s Introduction to The Roots of the Mountains, Works, XV, p. xi. R.A. Muncey said that Morris told him that he had written the book on a train journey to Aberdeen and back (The Leaguer, October, 1907).
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1 D. Hoare, op. cit, pp. 43 ff.
2 Letters, p. 371.
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1 For example, in The Water of the Wondrous Isles note the parallel between the death of the evil knight who is Birdalone’s suitor and the “Haystack in the Flood”; also the image of the Kings and Queens struck dead in the postures of life which recurs in The Earthly Paradise.
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1 W.B. Yeats on “The Happiest of the Poets” in Collected Works (1908), pp. 5570.
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1 See Appendix II and Paul Meier, La Pensee Utopique de William Morris, (Paris, 1972), discussed in the Postscript below.
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1 Commonweal, September 28th, 1889.
2 Ibid, December 22nd, 1888.
3 “The Socialist Ideal in Art”, Works, XXIII, p. 263.
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1Commonweal, January 28th, 1888.
2 Ibid., January 1st, 1887.
3 The whole process is envisaged in the chapter, “How the Change Came”, in News from Nowhere.
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1 R Page Arnot, William Morris, the Man and the Myth, p. 62.
2 Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, pp. 17–18.
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1 May Morris, II, p. 129.
2 Ibid., pp. 127–8.
3 “How We Live and How We Might Live”, Signs of Change, p. 31.
4 “Communism”, Works, XXm, p. 271.
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1 Letters, p. 287. See also Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, p. 289.
2 “Communism”, Works, XXIII, p. 275.
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1 “True and False Society”, Works, XXIII, p. 236.
2 “Looking Backward”, Commonweal, June 22nd, 1889.
3 “What Socialists Want”, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45333; Lemire, Unpublished Lectures, p. 230.
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1 Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, pp. 291–2.
2 “True and False Society”, Works, XXIII, p. 236.
3 May Morris, II, p. 199.
4 “How Shall We Live Then?”, International Review of Social History, XVI, 1971, Part 2, p. 12; cf. Commonweal, February 18th, 1888.
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1 Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, n. 317.
2 Paul Meier in his substantial examination of Morris’s political thought, La Pensée Utopique de William Morris (Paris, 1972), pp. 408–17 argues that Morris cannot have come upon the central themes of the Critique of the Gotha Programme independently: “il nous est difficile de croire qu’il ait pu s’élever tout seul à ce niveau théorique.” In particular he remarks upon Morris’s indebtedness to the theory of the Critique in his acceptance of two stages of transition to the new society—Socialism (with inequality of reward) and full communism. He points out that the manuscript of the Critique, written in 1875 but not published until 1891, was in the keeping of Engels, and suggests that Morris—directly or through the medium of Bax—was acquainted with its themes. This is possible. But see Postscript for further discussion.
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1 “The Society of the Future”, May Morris, II, p. 467.
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1 See Stirling, op. cit., p. 120 f.
2 May Morris testifies in several places to her father’s delight in Erewhon, and there seems to be a clear sign of Morris’s indebtedness to it in the conclusion to Ch. IX (“Concerning Love”) of News from Nowhere, where he envisages an improvement in the comeliness and beauty of the people in a Communist society. For an excellent study of the sources of News from Nowhere, see A.L. Morton, The English Utopia (1953).
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1 Glasier, p. 198. Another remark provoked by Looking Backward is recorded by May Morris (Works, XVI, p. xxviii): “If they brigaded me into a regiment of workers, I’d just lie on my back and kick.”
2 “Looking Backward”, Commonweal, June 22nd, 1899.
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1 A.L. Morton, op. cit., p. 164. For a criticism and self-criticism of the notion of a “Scientific Utopia”, see Postscript below.
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1 Saturday Review, October 10th, 1896.
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1 “William Morris as a Playwright”, by H.A. Barker, Walthamstow Weekly Times and Echo, November 15th, 1896.
2 Athenaeum, October 10th, 1896.
3 A. Compton-Rickett, William Morris: A Study in Personality, p. 28.
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1 May Morris, II, p. 221.
2 Athenaeum, October 10th, 1896.
3 H.H. Sparling, op. cit., p. 37.
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1 A Compton-Rickett, op. cit., p. 233.
2 See Edward Carpenter in Freedom, December, 1896: “At meals even it would happen that he could not sit still, but, jumping up from the table and talking vehemently, would quarter-deck the room.”
3 Atlantic Monthly, December, 1896.
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1 R.A. Muncey in The Leaguer, October, 1907.
2 Observer, November 19th, 1950.
3 Ibid, November 6th, 1949.
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1 May Morris, II, p. xxxix.
2 Ibid., p. 620. On April 5th, 1890, he was writing to his wife: “We met some Conservancy men going up the water in a big punt this morning: which makes me uneasy, as I fear their bedevilling the river: they are a crying example of the evils of bureaucratic centralization” (Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45338).
3 Works, XXII, p. 265.
4 Commonweal, October 6th, 1888.
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1 Works, XXII, p. xxiv.
2 May Morris, II, p. 457.
3 Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages, p. 80. See also May Morris, I, p. 663.
4 Fortnightly Review, March, 1903.
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1 Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, pp. 3–4.
2 Commonweal, August 7th, 1886.
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1 Commonweal, September, 1885.
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1 Glasier, p. 185.
2 Undated letter, 1886 or 1887, printed in Labour Leader, April 18th, 1903.
3 Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, pp. 299–300. 4
4 Paul Meier, “An Unpublished Lecture of William Morris: ‘How Shall We Live Then?’ “ International Review of Social History, XVI, 1971, 2, p. 14.
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1 See article by the Rev. C.L. Marson, “Socialists and Purity”, in Christian Socialist, September, 1886; also Commonweal, October 2nd, 1886.
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1 Bodleian Library, Oxford: MS Autogr. d. 21, pi. 220.
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1 Morris to Shaw, March 18th, 1885, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 50541.
2 Commonweal March 8th, 1890.
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1 Address by Harry Lowerison at the Annual Supper of the Kelmscott Fellowship, March, 1932 (typescript copy in Mattison Collection).
2 Journals of T.J. Cob den-Sander son, entry for August 2nd, 1884.
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1 Either to Jenny or May, September 2nd, 1888, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45340.
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1 Freedom, May, 1916.
2 MS. reminiscence in Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45350.
3 J.B. Leno, The Aftermath (1892), p. 86.
4 Mattison MSS.
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1 RA. Muncey in The Leaguer, October, 1907.
2 Carpenter, op. cit., p. 125.
3 Commonweal, August 28th, 1886.
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1 M. McMillan, The Life of Rachel McMillan (1927), p. 58.
2 “The Art of the People”, Works, XXII, p. 49.
3 St. James Gazette, October, 1896.
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1 See Life and Letters of Stopford Brooke (Ed. L.P. Jacks).
2 Daily Worker, March 24th, 1934.
3 Fortnightly Review, March, 1903.
4 May Morris, II, p. xl.
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1 Saturday Review, October 10th, 1896.
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1 May Morris, I, p. 147.
2 “The Society of the Future”, ibid., II. p. 457.
3 Commonweal, December 29th, 1888.
4 Ibid., April 9th, 1887.
5 Ibid., October 27th, 1888.
6 Ibid., August 27th, 1888.
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1 May Morris, II, p. 196.
2 Commonweal, June 29th, 1889.
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1 “The Political Outlook”, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45334.
2 Commonweal, March 21st, 1887.
3 Ibid., March 19th, 1887.
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1 Preface by Morris to R. Steele, Medieval Lore.
2 Owen Carroll, “William Morris”, Everyman, September 23rd, 1933.
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1 Commonweal, December 18th, 1886.
2 May Morris, II, p. 201.
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1 May Morris, II, p. 202.
2 “The Society of the Future”, ibid., p. 456.
3 Ibid, p. 203.
4 May Morris, II, p. 163.
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1 “On Some ‘Practical’ Socialists”, Commonweal February 18th, 1888.
2 May Morris, II, p. xviii.
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1 May Morris, II, p. 456.
2 Morris and Hyndman, Summary of the Principles of Socialism. For Morris’s opinions of individualism, see May Morris, I, p. 29, and II, p. 121 (“The Dull Level of Life”).
3 Commonweal, July 16th, 1887.
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1 “The Beauty of Life”, Works, XXII, p. 176.
2 See especially the work of M. Meier and M. Abensour discussed in the Postscript below.
3 The first edition of this book was published before Raymond Williams’s superb re-evaluation of this tradition, Culture and Society, had appeared. I have not revised my own account, which complements that of Williams: see also below, p. 793.
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1 “The Lesser Arts”, Works, XXII, pp. 17–18.
2 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45346.
3 ”Communism”, Works, XXIII, p. 270.
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1 “Communism”, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45331.