In twenty-one years (the interval between this book’s first publication and this revised edition) the terrain of scholarship changes, and so also do the preoccupations of scholars. I have no intention of offering here a comprehensive bibliography of recent writing which bears on Morris studies. But some books must be mentioned and others must be discussed more carefully.
First mention may go to the William Morris Society which, over the past twenty years, has organised a valuable series of events, lectures, and publications. The Society’s Journal carries an up-to-date bibliography, and in 1961 the Society’s Honorary Secretary, Mr. R.C.H. Briggs, published a Handlist of Morris’s addresses. A more complete list of lectures and speeches, and their dates of delivery, is to be found in Eugene D. LeMire’s Unpublished Lectures of William Morris:1 this presents in full for the first time ten lectures which had before been drawn upon only in my text or in May Morris’s two volumes. Another interesting lecture (of 1889), and notes for a further one, have been published by Paul Meier.2 Few important new letters have been published, apart from Morris’s letters to J.L. Mahon.3 A valuable collection of critical notices of Morris’s work has been brought together by Peter Faulkner,4 and at least two new selections of political writings have been made available.5
Much has been written on Morris’s practice of the arts. I’ve done little to revise my own chapter on these, although I am aware that it is inadequate to its several themes. When so much of expert authority has been published, the wisest course for one without such expertise is reticence. An important revision to received views of Morris’s influence was made by the late Peter Floud, who contested the view that the revolution in mid-Victorian taste was the consequence of “the Morris movement”, and who emphasised his—sometimes idiosyncratic, sometimes conservative—part within a wider tradition of innovation.6 Since Floud was kind enough to write to me approving of my chapter, I’ve let it stand, even though it follows at points the older convention. More recently there have been important new contributions from Paul Thompson, Ray Watkinson and others.7 Philip Henderson, in his biography of Morris, has also enlarged our knowledge of the Firm, drawing upon the correspondence of Warington Taylor and of Morris to Sir Thomas Wardle.8 From these materials, and from others in California, a definitive history of the Firm could now be written.9
By contrast, twenty-one years harvest of critical writing on Morris’s poetry and prose is disappointing. Apart from one lecture by Jack Lindsay10 and John Goode’s important study (discussed at the end of this Postscript) I find little that I can recommend. This may indicate a continuing adverse judgment upon Morris’s poetry, although I had expected that my own treatment of The Defence of Guenevere and The Earthly Paradise might have provoked a little comment, or at least disagreement, among scholars of English literature.11 These chapters constitute an important part of my argument about the crisis of Romanticism in early Victorian England, and I remain as ready to defend them today as when they were first written. In one area one may detect the first signs of a “thaw” in the icy resistance to Morris: a generation nourished upon Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (himself a sympathetic critic of Morris),12 is now willing to read with more complaisance the late prose romances. This increasing tolerance has enabled critics, whose prior interest is in Morris’s political thought, to show a renewed respect for The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains.13 When this book first appeared, the only notice (so far as I am aware) that it received from the literary establishment was in a corn-minatory review in the Times Literary Supplement, which reported that many pages—
“are dedicateci to defending the language of the saga translations and of the prose romances such as The Earthly Paradise [sic!] and The Well at the World’s End. Mr. Thompson, in fact, concentrates upon just those aspects of Morris’s work and thought which seem least relevant today.”14
Criteria of relevance have now changed, and I suspect that I may today be criticised, more properly, for giving inadequate attention to the prose romances than for “defending” them to excess.
Paul Thompson’s study of Morris is not limited to his work as a designer but offers a more comprehensive biography, structured around his work. Philip Henderson’s new biography is strongest in its recovery of Morris’s personal life and conflicts. Henderson repairs the obligatory silence of Mackail as to relations between William and Janey Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and he draws upon surviving correspondence between Janey and Rossetti which, at the time of my first writing, was not open to inspection. These letters illuminate the predicament of the three friends, but do not lead me to revise my earlier treatment. Philip Henderson is always perceptive15 upon all matters other than Morris’s political thought and action, and he often catches the nuances of personal relations better than I do: but where his interpretation rests upon Morris’s poems I prefer to stand by my own account. Perhaps the most significant new evidence to come to light relates not to the Morrises but to Edward and Geòrgie Burne-Jones: for it now appears that during the height of Janey’s and Rossetti’s mutual obsession, Ned Burne-Jones was also preoccupied in a love-affair, with Mary Zambaco. Undoubtedly this will have thrown Geòrgie and Morris more upon each other’s sympathy.16 As for the relations between Morris and Rossetti in later years, the new evidence can lead only to mournful conclusions. Janey was beset with unexplained illnesses, perhaps of neurotic origin. Rossetti mocked at Morris in his private letters to Janey, calling him, during the Eastern Question agitation, “the Odger of the Future”,17 while Morris commented, on Rossetti’s death:
“It makes a hole in the world, though I have seen so little of him lately, and might very likely never have seen him again: he was very kind to me when I was a youngster. He had some of the very greatest qualities of genius, most of them indeed; what a great man he would have been but for the arrogant misanthropy that marred his work, and killed him before his time: the grain of humility which makes a great man one of the people and no lord over them, he lacked, and with it lost the enjoyment of life which would have kept him alive, and sweetened all his work for him and us.”18
Some part of Janey Morris’s correspondence remains in private hands in the United States. It was made available to Henderson and (previously) to Rosalie Glynn Grylls (Lady Mander) for her Portrait of Rossetti (1964). Mrs. Grylls, as may be proper in a biographer, is always ready to extend sympathy to her subject, and, as may also be proper, she extends it also to the woman whom he loved. It needn’t follow that she should feel obliged to write ungenerously about William Morris. But she loses few opportunities of doing so. She implies, in a knowing way, that Morris was a failure as a lover: his early love poems were thrown together in a few minutes snatched from tapestry or wall-paper (but Morris was at work in neither medium when The Defence of Guenevere poems were written). Morris was drawn to the North, Janey and Rossetti to the South, and Grylls, who is one for the South also, commiserates with Janey. If Janey was often silent (Grylls notes with mature self-congratulation) this was only because she “saw through” Morris’s Socialist friends, notably Shaw. And more of all this.
I don’t wish to be misunderstood. It’s no part of my intention to offer a moralistic judgment on Janey’s and Rossetti’s behaviour. William and Janey Morris were not happy together, and in another time it might have been better if they could have separated and found other partners. But what gives offence is GrylPs implication that if Morris accepted the role of mari complaisant (even of a wounded and miserable one) this allows her to portray him as unmanly and as a subject for ridicule. This is one of the most ancient and most disabling of male-dominative stereotypes of sexual relations, and one which, in my own view, derives its damaging potency more from the universal dictatorship of the stereotype itself than from any inherent sexual determinations. Moreover, it is one which has been transmitted with peculiar force within feminine conventions. For generations women advised each other to condone or overlook the infidelities of their husbands, but to despise the husband who extended a similar courtesy to his wife. In short, while wishing in no way to pass judgment on Janey and Rossetti, I suggest that it was a matter of honour in Morris that he did not, in that difficult situation, act the conventional Victorian part of the “wronged” husband. For the rest, I haven’t myself attempted to consult any still-published letters from Janey in Mrs. Troxell’s collection. I think the matter has been pried into enough.19
Much new work has appeared on the Socialists of the 1880s and 1890s, although little bears directly on the Socialist League. My own account inevitably concentrated on Morris’s relations with Hyndman and gave inadequate attention to the S.D.F. at branch or district level. Chushichi Tsuzuki’s study of Hyndman gives a fair account of his end of the story.20 I have serious disagreements with Tsuzuki’s judgements here,21 but fewer with his capable study of Eleanor Marx.22 At the time of writing only the first volume of Yvonne Kapp’s definitive life of Eleanor Marx has appeared.23 The next volume, due to appear very shortly, should give us the first complete study of the Avelings’ work for the League and in the Bloomsbury Socialist Society: to judge by its predecessor, the book is likely to be both illuminating and persuasively partisan. And we now have fuller accounts of the activity of other colleagues of Morris in the Socialist propaganda.24 Dona Torr’s study of Tom Mann is indispensable for understanding the choppy period of new unionist upsurge and of the fragmentation of Socialist organization in the late 1880s.25 My own study of Tom Maguire enlarges upon the history of the League in the West Riding in the same years.26 The Fabian Society has also attracted a lot of scholarly attention.27 And more is now known about the ideas and the indefatigable Socialist propaganda in the 1880s of George Bernard Shaw: from his diary it appears that he was delivering up to 100 lectures and talks, under various auspices, each year. And it also appears from these sources that the theoretical confrontation between Fabianism and “Morrisism” was even more conscious and prolonged than I had supposed.28 This by no means exhausts the relevant new studies; no doubt I have overlooked work of importance; but this survey must suffice.
There remain some more substantive questions (and books) to be discussed. Several of the most recent studies of Morris or of British Socialism draw heavily upon my work, sometimes with generous acknowledgement and sometimes without. In short, my book came to be recognised as a “quarry” of information, although in one or two instances it appears that it was a suspect quarry, to be worked surreptitiously for doctoral advancement. One ought not to object to this: a quarry should release materials into the general fabric of scholarship. But what if my book was not a quarry but a construction meriting attention in its own right? And what if the stones lifted from it end up by adding only to the featureless sprawl of academic suburbia?
At least the question may be put. But one must be careful as to how the question is put. Several of my successors, in volumes appearing from the most reputable academic presses, are in agreement that the question can be put in only one way: my scholarship is vitiated by Marxist dogmatism. A work “of intelligent and exhaustive scholarship”, in one generous account, “but it is marred by the author’s intense Marxian bias.” Morris’s activities “are examined through the prism of the class struggle and the result is a somewhat distorted view of Morris’s ideas.”29 Another finds my book “flawed by its misguided attempt to present its object as an orthodox Marxist.”30 A less generous critic notes that my book devoted “some 900 pages to demonstrate that Morris was really a Marxist.”31
I had thought that the book was something rather different. It is, in a central respect, an argument about the Romantic tradition and its transformation by Morris. (It is of interest that I and Raymond Williams, whose important Culture and Society appeared three years after this book, should have been, unknown to each other, working upon different aspects of the Romantic critique of Utilitarianism). But, leaving this aside, one has to ask whether it may not be the political commitment of Morris, and not of Marx, which has given offence to these authors? In which case my own offence has been chiefly that of showing an intense Morrisian bias? The question is difficult: it is true that in 1955 I allowed some hectoring political moralisms, as well as a few Stalinist pieties, to intrude upon the text. I had then a somewhat reverent notion of Marxism as a received orthodoxy, and my pages included some passages of polemic whose vulgarity no doubt makes contemporary scholars wince. The book was published at the height of the Cold War. Intellectual McCarthyism was not confined to the United States, although few in the subsequent generations understand its discreet British modes of operation. Marxist sympathies were so disreputable that they could find little expression outside of Communist publications; and the vulgarity of my own polemic32 can only be understood against the all-pervasive and well-furnished vulgarities of the anti-Marxist orthodoxies of that time.
The climate can be illustrated by the welcome afforded my book in the non-Socialist press.33 This welcome was mainly a silence, broken by the review in the Times Literary Supplement, headed “Morris and Marxism”. The reviewer reported that my book was “heavily biased by Marxism” and “splenetic in tone”; the “remarkable feat” of its author is that “he manages to sustain a mood of ill-temper through a volume of 900 pages”. My citations from Morris’s political writings “show how fluffy were Morris’s socialist views”, and the book as a whole “merely serves to emphasize aspects of Morris which are better left forgotten.”34 It is clear that it was Morris, and not Thompson, nor even Marx, who must be pushed back into the silence of disrepute.
All this was (in those days) predictable. So far from dismaying one it was a tonic to one’s fighting-blood: in a sense, even one’s self-righteous sectarian errors were confirmed within the circular field of antagonism to such official lampoons and silences. Despite this (and perhaps because of the post-1956 “thaw”) the book found its way into university and public libraries. Some years afterwards it began to find its way out again, being rather widely stolen; for several years (I am told) it has been “missing” from both the British Museum and the Bodleian, although whether through the agency of the Congress for Cultural Freedom or of readers converted by Morris to an over-literal repudiation of bourgeois property-rights (but what is bourgeois about the common use-rights of a library?) must be left undetermined. In all this, the book became typed, by enemies and even by some friends, as offering only one finding: the Morris=Marx equation. And yet the book, while perhaps offering too tidy an account of that relation, by no means contented itself with showing Morris ending his life in an orthodox Marxist terminus. The point was, rather, that Morris was an original Socialist thinker whose work was complementary to Marxism. And in repeated emphases, and in particular in the stress upon Morris’s genius as a moralist, it should not have been difficult for a sensitive reader to have detected a submerged argument within the orthodoxy to which I then belonged.
But this line of argument is an uneasy one, since it focusses attention on my own intellectual evolution (and apologetics) and distracts attention from our proper concern: William Morris and his political thought. And we should return to the question already proposed: have some recent writers used the criticism of my book to mask their ulterior dislike of Morris, so that for Thompson’s “intense Marxian bias” we ought really to read “Morris’s uncompromising commitment to revolutionary Socialism?” For if I had really falsified my In this Postscript I distinguish references back to the revised text of this book by placing these in italics thus (262), from references to the works of other authors under discussion, which are thus (p. 162).
account of Morris’s positions, one would suppose that these critics would go on to correct my account, in informed and accurate ways. But I don’t find that this has been done. Thus Willard Wolfe, who affirms that my attempt to present Morris as a Marxist is “misguided”, offers no close examination of Morris’s Socialist writings, and presents, in succession, the following judgments on Morris’s Socialism: a) his lectures of the 1880s “advocated a form of Radical-individualist utopianism that was very similar to Shaw’s” (p. 132 n.48);* b) his Socialism was “ethical-aesthetic” (p. 162); and c) Morris “must be classed among the Christian Socialist recruits” to the S.D.F. since his Socialism was “essentially religious in character” and was “grounded on an essentially Christian ideal of brotherhood” (p. 174, 301). This may be good enough for Yale University Press, but it would have been rejected by the Editor of Commonweal: what it seems to argue is that Morris’s Socialism was really very nice, and never rude, although it leaves unresolved the question as to how “Radical-individualist Utopianism” was reconciled with the “Christian ideal of brotherhood”.
J.W. Hulse, in Revolutionists in London,35 does a little better: but not much. He has had a good idea for a book and has executed that idea unevenly. His intention was to treat the inter-relations between the ideas of five remarkable men, co-habitants of London in the 1880s and 1890s—Stepniak, Kropotkin, Morris, Shaw and Bernstein. Despite the fact that the ideas under discussion float around in a state of political weightlessness, some parts of the study are executed well. It may be because I know the subject best that I find the study of Morris to be the worst. Hulse, who knows that my book is marred by “intense Marxian bias”,36 knows a great many more things about Morris’s Socialism, although his knowledge is supported more often by assertion than by argument: thus (of the Manifesto of the Socialist League (Appendix I)), “it incorporates several of the Marxian arguments, but the basic tone was moderate” (p. 85); of the Split:
*In this Postscript I distinguish references back to the revised text of this book by placing these in italics thus (162), from references to the works of other authors under discussion, which are thus (p. 162).
“Morris found it necessary to make the break because Hyndman’s faction was too authoritarian, too wildly militant, and too opportunistic—in short, too Marxist.” (p. 85).
We are also reassured that “the doctrine of the class struggle was one of the Marxian ideas that was only gradually and partially assimilated by Morris.” (p. 81). In short, once again Morris’s Socialism is shown to have been nice; and if Marxism is defined as “authoritarian”, “wild”, and “opportunistic” (i.e. not nice) then Morris can scarcely have been associated with it unless by accident. But it is not clear that Hulse has helped us towards any precisions. Since he has evidently made no study of Commonweal or of the actual political movement37 his assertions cannot be shown to be supported by anything more than academic self-esteem.
This is a pity, since Hulse does have a correction of substance to offer to my account. He argues that Morris may have been more influenced by Kropotkin and by the Communist-Anarchists than has been generally allowed: in particular in his notion of federated communes, as envisaged in “The Society of the Future” and in News from Nowhere. It is a fair point: the “withering away of the State” was not a major preoccupation of Engels or of the Marxist circles of the 1880s, whereas it was a preoccupation shared by Morris and Kropotkin. (Morris noted in 1887 that he had “an Englishman’s wholesome horror of government interference & centralization which some of our friends who are built on the German pattern are not quite enough afraid of” (451)). Morris’s imagination may well have been stimulated more by Kropotkin and by arguments with his followers in the League than I have suggested. But Hulse damages his own argument by special pleading and thin scholarship, thickened up with anti-Marxist rancour. His conclusion offers an eclectic’s bazaar which might stand in for a dozen other contemporary academic accounts: “Morris’s Socialism might best be described as catholic, borrowing from the Middle Ages and from Russian nihilism, as well as from Mill and from Marx” (p. 110). It might “best be described” in this way if the object of the exercise is polite conversation, but not if it is accurate definition: what, one wonders, was borrowed, and how were these unlikely elements combined? “It serves little purpose”, Hulse concludes, “to insist that Morris belonged more to one branch of Socialism, or Communism, or anarchism, than to another” (p. 109). That may be so: the “claiming” of Morris for this or that tendency has less purpose than I once supposed myself. But what, surely, may serve a purpose, if we wish to attend to Morris, is to define what Morris’s Socialism was, what were its controlling ideas, values and strategies? And this can scarcely be done if we disregard his polemic against Fabianism on the one hand, and Anarchism on the other. By neglecting both, and by straining the case for Kropotkin’s influence, Hulse ends up as only one more (muddled) claimant.
I would not have laboured my disagreements with Hulse if they didn’t illustrate a very general problem of the interpretation of Morris. What is being done, again and again, is that a stereotype of Marxism in its subsequent evolution is being brought back to Morris, and the attempt is then made either to dissociate Morris from it or to assimilate him altogether to it (discarding anything unassimilable as “immaturities” or Romantic hang-overs). But the important question might be not whether Morris was or was not a Marxist, but whether he wras a Morrisist; and, if he was, whether this was a serious and coherent position in its own right? The problem is illustrated, from different directions, by two studies, both more serious than any noticed up to this point: Stanley Pierson’s Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism38 and Paul Meier’s La Pensee Utopique de William Morris.
Stanley Pierson does not offer a stereotype of Marxism, and his study is in most respects well-founded. He is interested in the intellectual tendencies within British Socialism between 1880 and 1900, and he takes us steadily through intellectual precursors, and thence to Hyndman, Morris, Bax, Carpenter, the Fabians, Glasier, Blatchford, Mahon, Hardie, the Anarchists, the Labour Churches. They are all put together between the same covers, informatively and often shrewdly, and they are held in place, not only by the binding, but also by a controlling argument which, summarised, is this: when Marxist ideas became a presence in British life, they operated upon a ground of native intellectual traditions: those of Utilitarianism, of Christian nonconformity, and of the Romantic tradition as mediated by Carlyle and Ruskin. No sooner had the new ideas appeared than they became subject to a process of assimilation within the older traditions: they became “attached to deeply ingrained attitudes and feelings”. “Marxist theory, in any strict sense, disintegrated rapidly in the Britain of the eighties”, but only through “a complex process of mediation” which diverted the native traditions into new channels. Pierson argues that in different ways both Fabianism and the Marxism of Hyndman reverted to the control of the utilitarian tradition; Morris, of course, signals the junction of the Marxist and Romantic traditions, but it was an incomplete junction (“The new system of thought was superimposed on his earlier ideas rather than integrated with them” (p. 80)), and in the result those activists most influenced by Morris “fell back on the moral sentiments released by a disintegrating [Nonconformist] religious tradition” (p. 275). “Marxist ideas entered creatively into the working-class movement only through the breakup of the distinctive synthesis which Marx had constructed” (pp. 276–7). In this breakup any inheritance from Morris came largely by way of Merrie England, or through the ethical and sometimes religious Socialism of I.L.P. evangelists like the Glasiers—a Socialism which had lost both “the cutting edge of serious theoretical analysis” and the “reach” for creative alternatives (p. 276).
This account is fair and persuasive. At one level it is an acceptable account of what took place; and Pierson only strengthens his argument when he points out that, so far from British development being unique, “later European Marxism has followed much the same pattern of breakdown and re-assimilation” to national traditions (p. 278), even when the resulting mixture was sometimes acclaimed as orthodox “Marxism”. But at another level, which must most concern the student of Morris, the account is less acceptable. To begin with, this intellectual history is seen in terms of the polite culture: but when we consider the problem of the relation of Socialist theory to the working-class movement in 18801900, the “inherited pattern of thought and feeling” which demands attention is not that of Utilitarianism, nor of Romanticism, nor even (except for certain regions) Nonconformity, but that of Labourism—that is, a class culture, already with a long history of struggle, with its own organisational forms and strategies, as well as a certain class morale, although these strategies and forms were in important ways influenced by, and sometimes subordinated to, the ideas which Pierson describes. This need not contradict Pierson’s argument; for this class culture was able to assimilate the “ethical Socialism” of Merrie England and of some part of Morris, in ways which were not negligible but which still fell short of challenging the controlling strategies of the movement; leaving, nevertheless, a residue in terms of motivation, goal, rhetoric, “Clause Four” obstinacy and even—more than some Marxist historians are willing to allow—Socialist priorities expressed at local levels, which have contributed much to the ambiguities of the modern Labour movement and to the difficulties of its more abject parliamentary leaders.
What this raises, acutely, is the problem of ideology, and this is not a problem which Pierson addresses.39 For the record is something more than one of intellectual “mediations” or “assimilations”. Very sharp theoretical confrontations were taking place, in which emergent Socialist thought contested with the “common-sense” of Victorian liberal-capitalist society and its dominant ideological illusions. And the reminder leads us to two attendant considerations. First, in what sense did the new Socialist theory (and its strategies) constitute a critical break, or rupture, not with this or that point of liberal Victorian thought, but with the organising ideas of bourgeois Liberalism? If we argue that it did constitute such a rupture, it need not follow that the new Socialist theory was in all respects mature, coherent and without self-contradiction;40 it follows only that at critical points, and in certain controlling ideas, this theory was antagonistic to bourgeois ideology, and, specifically, proposed not the amelioration of the liberal capitalist state but its revolutionary transformation. It will follow that, when we attend to Pierson’s arguments about “assimilation”, we will be alert to see how far such assimilation went, and whether it went so far as to dissolve the revolutionary pretentions of the new theory and drag it back, across the “rupture”, into an accommodation with the old: or whether it served only to confuse and constrict (perhaps in serious ways) the new. Thus Pierson may be right (I think he is) to argue that the Fabians and the Marxists of the S.D.F. (and of other European sections) shared an abbreviated notion of economic man which had a good deal in common with the utilitarian tradition. But the Fabians matched this with theories of rent and of value, of the State, and of history, and with a strategy of permeation, which clearly dragged them back across the ideological divide; whereas the S.D.F., despite all the difficulties which Hyndman presents, continued to offer, until the eve of the World War, a confused and sectarian theory of revolutionary Socialism.41
I’m not suggesting that there are some talismanic concepts (Marx’s theory of value, the theory of the State) which allow us instantly to identify whether the controlling theory of any person or group is “bourgeois” or “revolutionary”. Analysis will never be as easy as that. Still less am I suggesting that there is one single, “correct”, immanent Socialist orthodoxy. I’m arguing, as I argued twenty-one years ago, that there is a “river of fire”. One has to resist a tendency in historians of ideas to see concepts only in their lineage of inheritance and in their mutations: this was mediated by that, and that was assimilated into the other, and all this went on in a world of discourse as congenial as the reading-rooms in which we consult the old periodicals. But—and this is our second consideration—these ideas inhabited actual people in actual contexts (often contexts of serious class confrontation-Bloody Sunday, the miners’ strikes, the Sudan War, the new unionism), and the ideas had work to do in the present before they were passed on down the line. It might even be asked (although this is at odds with certain notions of the academic discipline) whether certain ideas were right?
In the face of these considerations, doubts as to Pierson’s analysis multiply. It lacks not only any argument about critical breaks between opposing intellectual systems, but also any sense of politics. We can follow the argument only as it bears upon Morris. The entry might best be through the problem of imperialism, which Pierson never faces, since imperialism is not, in his sense of the term, an intellectual tradition. But if we set ourselves in 1890, and employ hindsight, the major disaster which was bearing down upon the European Socialist and working-class movements was the World War and the ignominious collapse of the Second International. Insofar as this disaster was the consequence of those complex processes which we group together as “imperialism”, then surely the responses to these processes, and to national-chauvinist complicity within the working-class movement, will dwarf in importance Pierson’s more intellectual criteria of classification? Applying this test, we find that the response of the S.D.F. to imperialism was contradictory; the response of the I.L.P. was evasive and ambiguous. The Fabian response was wholly unambiguous; indeed, at one time the Fabians were unabashed advocates of imperial “rationalisation”.42 The response of William Morris was also, as I show in detail, unambiguous and indeed prophetic.
This might suggest two things: either that Pierson’s conventional description of the “Romantic” derivation of Morris’s ideas (with Marxist concepts “superimposed” upon Romanticism but not “integrated” with it) is an inadequate account: or that the Romantic tradition had possibilities of antagonism to capitalist common-sense a good deal tougher than it is usual to attribute to it. I believe that both suggestions are correct. For Pierson’s account of Morris’s political theory manages, in some way, to leave out Morris’s politics: his Commonweal notes, his active organization, his anti-imperialist and internationalist actions, his struggle to defeat chauvinism within the movement. Pierson’s inattention is such that he is able to write that Morris “virtually dissolved moral claims in aesthetic feelings”, (p. 275)43 and that “Morris carried much further the tendency (evident in Carlyle and Ruskin) toward eliminating clear acknowledgement of those impulses in men which did not harmonize with their desire for fellowship and beauty.”44 These are odd comments to make upon a thinker who argued that “the death of all art” was preferable to its survival among an élite which owed its condition to class supremacy (664); and who, more than any other of this time, cast his eye forward to the disasters of our century, identified the “Manichean hatred of the world” loose in the polite culture (240), envisaged the possibility of imperialism leading on to “a regular epoch of war” (428), and of the transition to Socialism proving to be “more terrible, far more confused and full of suffering than the period of the fall of Rome” (723), and who, finally, argued that the “tremendous organization under which we live”, rather than “lose anything which really is its essence… will pull the roof of the world down upon its head” (542).45 It’s not easy to see how Pierson can derive such startingly prophetic foresight from a consciousness which refused to acknowledge impulses in men other than their desire for fellowship and beauty. “From the Marxist standpoint”, Pierson assures us, “the Socialism of Morris was regressive—a relapse into the subjectivism and idealism from which Marx has attempted to rescue earlier Socialist reformers”; in short, Morris reverted to “Utopianism” (pp. 274, 84).46
So there are two disagreements, and each of them is large. First, I hold, against Pierson, that certain critical and controlling Socialist concepts were not “superimposed” upon Morris’s Romantic critique, but were indeed integrated with it, and in such a way as to constitute a rupture in the older tradition, and to signal its transformation.47 Insofar as these concepts were consonant with those of Marx, and were in some cases derived directly from Marxist sources, we ought to call them Marxist. Second, I hold, against Pierson, that the Romantic tradition is not to be defined only in terms of its traditional, conservative, “regressive”, “escapist”, and “utopian” characteristics—and hence to be seen as a continual undertow threatening to draw Morris back to “subjectivism” and “idealism”—but contained within it resources of a quite different nature, capable of undergoing this transformation independently of the precipitate of Marx and Engels’s writing. This is to say, the moral critique of capitalist process was pressing forward to conclusions consonant with Marx’s critique, and it was Morris’s particular genius to think through this transformation, effect this juncture, and seal it with action. Nor should Pierson have been unaware that the typing of this Romantic critique as “regressive”, “utopian”, and “idealist” is a facile way of getting out of the problem, for an alternative way of reading that tradition had been proposed, not only in this book, in 1955, but, very cogently, by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society in 1958. If Pierson is right that “from the Marxist standpoint the Socialism of Morris was regressive”—and we can’t know how Marx himself would have seen it—this may only be a comment on the imaginative lethargy and theoretical constriction which orthodox Marxism was undergoing from the 1880s. It need not prove (if it is true) that the juncture was impossible or that Morris was an intellectual incompetent. It might even mean that orthodox Marxism turned its back upon a juncture which it neglected to its own peril and subsequent disgrace.
I prefer to press the issue in this way, since I can now see, very much more clearly than when I first wrote this book, the danger of the other stereotype. This argues that William Morris “became a Marxist”, was “converted to Marxism”, &c. The danger is to be found throughout M. Paul Meier’s weighty and often helpful study.48 I’m sorry that I must take issue with him, for this major attention paid to Morris’s political thought by a scrupulous French scholar is yet one more indication that this thought is alive and is not confined to a national idiom. Meier has carefully considered classical, utopian and other influences upon Morris; he has examined with the greatest care every evidence of Marxist influence upon him, either through texts or by way of conversations with Engels and with Bax;49 and he has then assembled all the elements of Morris’s writings about Communist society (and the transitional stage of Socialism) and has presented these with greater system than I (or, it must be said, Morris) attempted. All this is done lucidly and with generous respect for his subject. One can be assured that the book will put a final end to much rubbish.
But major difficulties remain. Meier offers Morris to us as an orthodox Marxist, and his notion of this orthodoxy is heavily influenced by its subsequent Marxist-Leninist definition. When Morris fails to match these requirements, Meier is able to apologise for him, with sympathetic allusion to his weaknesses in economic analysis, the lack of available Marxist texts, or to his Leftist immaturities or vestigial idealist survivals. The notion of Marxism as a correct truth is assumed throughout, and Morris is judged approvingly in terms of his approximation to this. Meier by no means intends to diminish his subject’s stature or to disallow his original influence upon Socialist thought; but, in the result, he does both.
A small part of this lies in the treatment of Morris-Engels relations, already discussed in my text. The Engels-Lafargue correspondence50 became available subsequent to my first edition: at some places, where Meier derives from it illumination, I derive only irritation. It is impossible, in my view, to study this and other evidence without concluding that on occasion Engels and the extended political family of Marx (operating largely through the German party) had a mischievous and élitist influence upon the European movement. This is perhaps only a small defect to set against the immense and positive influence of Engels’s central work, and the perspicacity of many of his judgments. But this small defect rubbed rather sharply, on occasion, against Morris’s shins, and (after reading the Lafargue letters) I sharpened my own judgments at one point in the revision (470-1). By 1887-8 Morris had reason to feel that his shins were raw. The actions of the “Marxists” of the League had been damaging and un-comradely; although their strategy was an improvement upon Morris’s purism, it was folly in them to force matters to an issue on the least significant issue (that of parliamentary candidatures);51 the attempt to manipulate a doctrinal unity of the European movement on the basis of the German party’s programme justified Morris’s irritation at Bax being “steeped in the Marxite pickle” (471); and (a point I had overlooked) on top of all this Morris’s continued solidarity with the German party resulted, early in 1888, in his being dunned for the very heavy sum of £1,000 in a libel action.52 Indeed, in Morris’s personal encounters with the Marxist family circle, one is chiefly impressed by his forbearance.
But, questions of tactics and of personality apart, other questions remain. Meier presses the claim that Engels’s subterranean influence can be sensed throughout Morris’s writings; indeed, he presses this very far, and further than I can possibly follow him. Again and again, when Meier notes a congruity between Morris and Marxist text, he assumes that Morris could not have reached such a position independently, and he speculates upon a derivation—a sight of an unpublished manuscript, a mediation through Bax. Sometimes the case is well-sustained.53 At other times it is sustained by little more than the assumption that Morris was incapable of arriving at any original “Marxist” conclusion by his own route:54 “Malgré notre sincère admiration pour son génie,” Meier writes, “et notre refus de ne voir en lui qu’un rêveur, il nous est difficile de croire qu’il ait pu s’élever tout seul à ce niveau théorique” (p. 409).55 At other times, again we are faced with exactly that juncture between Morris and Marxism which has been my theme. We needn’t waste time on the trivial question of ascribing priority of thought to Morris or to Engels. What Meier is doing, when he insists that Morris’s Socialist concepts must always be derivative from “Marxism”, is, first, narrowing the notion of Marxism to a kind of family tradition—a sort of Royal Legitimacy from which alone descent may be derived—and, second, gravely underestimating the vigour of the tradition which Morris had transformed, and which still stood quite as much at his back as Hegel stood at the back of Marx.
A striking example arises in Meier’s treatment of dialectical historical consciousness. He cites the famous passage from the conclusion to A Dream of John Ball (“I pondered how men fight and lose the battle…”) and notes, as I had noted, its congruity with a passage of Engels’s Ludwig Feuerbach (722). But for Meier such a coincidence can’t be accidental, and he goes on to speculate upon Morris’s knowledge of unpublished sources of Marxist dialectics. This speculation has a little point to it. As Meier notes, the conclusion to Note C in the League’s Manifesto (739) expresses a dialectical sense of historical process, written in Morris’s style, although we know that the metaphor of “the spiral” is one that he owed to Bax (pp. 689–92, 693). And, as Meier also notes, there was then no available instruction-kit of Marxist dialectics. Ergo, Morris had received tuition in this, either directly from the author of The Dialectics of Nature (unpublished until 1925) or by way of Bax.
There are two objections to this. The first (too complex to press here) is that it is a matter of argument whether anything was gained by formalising “the dialectic” in this way. If we are thinking of contradiction, and of the “double-edged, double-tongued” process of social change, Morris had already grasped this, and was confirmed in it by his reading of Capital. The second is that, once Morris had reached Socialist conclusions and effected a definitive rupture with Whiggish notions of progress, he must—and did—arrive at a dialectical understanding of process, not just because he had arrived at “Marxism”, but because of the whole force of the Romantic tradition that pressed behind him. Indeed, few passages of his writings have a greater sense of inevitability than the final meditations in John Ball The Romantic critique is easily described as “regressive” or “nostalgic” because it is grounded upon an appeal to pre-capitalist values: and this is most specifically so in Morris, with his imaginative location of value in medieval, Old Icelandic and Germanic contexts. As Williams has noted, Morris carries directly through into his Socialist thought some of the terms of the Romantic critique of Utilitarianism, as in the opposition of the notion of community (or “true society”) to “mechanical civilization”.56 So that it is difficult to see how Morris could have transformed that tradition if he had not attained to a dialectical notion (Bax’s “spiral”) of the reassertion at a new level and in new forms of pre-capitalist values of community and of “barbarism”.57
Meier, in presenting Morris’s thought as system, clarifies much: but he loses the understanding of its own authentic dynamic—how and where it broke through on its own. And I must insist upon the importance of my chapter, “The ‘Anti-Scrape’ “, a chapter which I dare say impatient Socialist readers generally skip. For this, as much as “The River of Fire”, analyses Morris at the point of transforming a tradition, when he is confronted by problems which demand a solution both in practice and in theory. “The essence of what Ruskin taught us”, Morris said, “was really nothing more recondite than this, that the art of any epoch must of necessity be the expression of its social life.”58 This was, please note, what Ruskin taught, and not Marx, and in 1880, when he had never so much as heard of Marx’s name, Morris was writing:
“So the life, habits, and aspirations of all groups and classes of the community are founded on the economical conditions under which the mass of the people live, and it is impossible to exclude socio-political questions from the consideration of aesthetics.”59
It was to “Anti-Scrape” that he spoke, in 1884, of the new understanding of history:
“Inchoate order in the remotest times… moving forward ever towards something that seems the very opposite of that which it started from and yet the earlier order never dead but living in the new, and slowly moulding it to a recreation of its former self.” (236).
The thought prefigures A Dream of John Ball, and entails the same dialectical sense of process. Bax (or Engels) may have found a name for this (the “spiral”) but Morris was already immersed in the problems which it named: why was it impossible to reproduce Gothic architecture? How were the handicrafts of an earlier social order (unless by some spiral of change) to be revived? And in the same Address Morris paused to acknowledge both Ruskin and the Marx of Capital. But what he acknowledged as a debt to Marx was not some total and new revelation as to historical process but a specific understanding of the effects of the capitalist mode of production, for profit rather than use, upon the workshops of the “manufacturing system”. (238) This can’t be seen just as a conversion by Marx to “Marxism”. It is a juncture of two strong traditions, and the second didn’t attain to its supremacy only after assassinating the first.
So that I can accept neither Pierson’s notion that certain Marxist concepts were “superimposed” upon Morris’s Romanticism, without integration; nor Meier’s implicit judgment that Romanticism is co-terminous with “idealism” (in its orthodox Marxist connotation), and hence to be sloughed off when Morris became “a Marxist”.60 And if we have to choose between errors, it may be the second which is the more disabling. I may seem to be dancing on the point of a pin, but others have danced there before me. Raymond Williams, when offering in 1958 a cogent criticism of the self-contradictions of English Marxist critics (including myself) noted:
“It certainly seems relevant to ask English Marxists who have interested themselves in the arts whether this is not Romanticism absorbing Marx, rather than Marx transforming Romanticism. It is a matter of opinion which one would prefer to happen.” (p. 274)
But, if we let Morris stand in for “Romanticism”, these are not the only alternatives. It is possible also to envisage the Romantic tradition, transformed as it was by Morris (in part through his encounter with Marx), entering into a common Communist tradition to which it could contribute its particular emphases, vocabulary and concerns. It was a distinctive contribution of Culture and Society to show how tough this long Romantic critique of industrial capitalism had been; and I would add that Williams’s own writing, over two decades, has exemplified how tough a mutation of that tradition can still be, and how congruent to the thought of Marx.
At least we have to ask what could lie inside the phrase, “Marx transforming Romanticism?” This might stand for what was actually effected in Morris’s own thought. Or it might only mean that Marxism could gobble Romanticism up, both beak and quill, assimilating its good faith as useful nutriment, and discarding its “sentimentalism”, its moral realism, and its Utopian courage as so much idealist excrement. And it is this second response which only too often appears to characterise Engels’s reactions to Morris. There was a brief moment of mutual warmth at the time of the “Split”, when Morris was delighted to find the Old Norse Edda on Engels’s table and responded by reading him some passages from Sigurd: “It went off very well.”61 Thereafter the disdainful and dismissive references multiply: Engels could not be bothered to “manage” this “rich artist-enthusiast” and “sentimental socialist”. (471) There is no evidence that he read Hopes and Fears for Art (1882) nor Signs of Change (1888), and there is evidence that he left News from Nowhere unread. He did read Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome, and signalled a tepid approval, but this was a text of the movement which he was scanning for its utility: there is not the least suggestion that he might have had anything to learn from Morris in his turn. As I noted in 1959, “while Morris strained hard and successfully to understand and absorb much of Engels’s tradition, Engels made no comparable effort in Morris’s direction.”62
Marx, whose early revolt was germane to the Romantic tradition, might have met Morris more warmly. But this can’t be passed off as a matter of temperament. Engels’s disdain for Morris exemplifies the narrowing orthodoxy of those years, a narrowing noted not only in his own writings but in the Marxist tradition more generally. As tendencies towards determinism and positivism grew, so the tradition suffered a general theoretical closure, and the possibility of a juncture between traditions which Morris offered was denied. The Romantic critique of capitalism, however transformed, became suspect as “moralism” and “utopianism”. I should not need, in 1976, to labour the point that the ensuing lack of moral self-consciousness (and even vocabulary) led the major Marxist tradition into something worse than confusion.63 But this’ helps us to identify two important points about Morris’s contemporary significance. First, it is more important to understand him as a (transformed) Romantic than as a (conforming) Marxist. Second, his importance within the Marxist tradition may be seen, today, less in the fact of his adhesion to it than in the Marxist “absences” or failures to meet that adhesion half-way. Morris’s “conversion” to Marxism offered a juncture which Marxism failed to reciprocate, and this failure—which is in some sense a continuing failure, and not only within the majority Communist tradition—has more to teach us than have homilies as to Morris’s great-hearted commitment.64
One would expect that the most significant new studies of Morris would be directed to these problems. And it is heartening to find two writers, Miguel Abensour and John Goode, whose work carries my points a great deal further. Abensoür has presented a new study of the Utopian tradition, which, after a chain of subtle analysis, places exceptional emphasis upon Morris’s critical (and unexhausted) significance.65 Since M. Abensour’s work will not be easily available to English-speaking readers for some time, I must report his conclusions with care. He writes from a critical position (a position of the “Left”) within French Marxist culture; and he attends with especial care to what other Socialist writers have written about Morris: Guyot, Page Arnot, A.L. Morton, John Middle ton Murry,66 Williams, Meier and myself: and none of us escapes criticism. Abensour recognises the importance of Page Arnot’s Vindication of Morris (1934) in confronting the anti-Marxist myths of the time. But he argues that this also established the countervailing myth within the Marxist tradition, in which all that was “valuable” in Morris’s thought had first to be passed through the sieve of an orthodoxy, and any bits of Utopianism too large to be pushed through the holes could be forgiven by invoking the licence afforded to a poet (p. 252). The new myth was not wrong to show that Morris was a practical and theoretical adherent to the Marxist tradition: it was wrong in passing over or apologising for significant differences of emphasis within that tradition (where Morris stood, with Domela Nieuwenhuis, on the “Left”), and in neglecting aspects of his thought which could not be assimilated. I am found less guilty of such assimilation and neglect than some others, but Abensour finds that I run aground, alongside A.L. Morton, on the problem of Utopianism; and he chides me for evasion in accepting the formula, “Scientific Utopia”; for News from Nowhere (p. 263).67 Behind this formula he detects a rejection of the validity of the Utopian mode in any form: a “Scientific Utopia” may be condoned only because it is not really Utopian.
Abensour argues that the critique of Utopian Socialism in the Communist Manifesto and, even more, in Engels’s Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, gave rise in the subsequent Marxist tradition to a doctrinal antinomy: Science (good), Utopianism (bad). At any point after 1850 Scientific Socialism had no more need for Utopias (and doctrinal authority for suspecting them). Speculation as to the society of the future was repressed, and displaced by attention to strategy. Beyond “the Revolution” little more could be known than certain skeletal theoretical propositions, such as the “two stages” foreseen in The Critique of the Gotha Programme. It must follow that orthodox Marxists must approach William Morris with great uneasiness. What was this throwback to Utopianism doing within the Marxist tradition at all? Perhaps his was a case of misrecognition? The usual solution was to propose a respect for Morris (for his good intentions and his more explicit political texts) beneath which was hidden a yawning condescension: Morris, who became “a Marxist” at fifty, couldn’t be expected to shed all his old Romantic habits, most of which were charming or amusing; but while the form of his writings remains “utopian”, the content became, in good part, “scientific”; and what can not be shown to conform to Marxist text may be passed over. The solution, in short, has been to propose that Morris was not really a Utopian at all.
These are not Abensour’s words but a gloss upon his argument. And I will gloss also certain of his counterproposals: (i) While one may assent (as he does) to the criticisms by Marx and Engels of the pre-1850 Utopian Socialists, these are local political judgments which need not condemn, once and for all, any generic Utopian mode; (ii) Morris is, inescapably, a Utopian Communist, not only in News from Nowhere, but also on the evidence of a large part of his more directly political writing, and any judgment which fails to confront this squarely is guilty of evasion; (iii) The question of Morris’s relations to Marxism raises acutely the question, not as to whether Marxists should criticise Morris, but whether Marxism should criticise itself?
Let us now see, in more detail, how Abensour pursues these arguments. The conventional Marxist approach to Morris (he argues) combines an exercise of “domestication” and “repression”, in which the Utopian components in his thought are reduced to an expression of Scientific Socialism (p. 270). It is Meier who draws upon himself Abensour’s sharpest critique. In admitting News from Nowhere to the Marxist canon, Meier must first pass it through a double scrutiny: first, he must extract from it certain propositions, which are then compared with propositions in Morris’s more explicit political writings: then these propositions are compared, in their turn, with the texts of Marx and Engels, as “a kind of Supreme Court, alone qualified to pronounce a final verdict”. The theoretical texts are thus used as a master-key to de-code the Utopian work (p. 345). As a result, Meier at last “gives a name to the ‘Nowhere’ from which we’ve had news: the name of the continent is Marxism” (p. 346). But we are permitted to respond to the work only insofar as it has been found correct, by way of this double textual verification. Where it is correct, the Utopia may be said to be “scientific”. Primacy is given, in Meier’s analysis, to the “theory of the two stages”, as found in The Critique of the Got ha Programme, a text which we might well be advised to hold in our right hand and study carefully, while we scan News from Nowhere in our left. The function of this “Scientific Utopia” is then reduced to the “illustration” of truths already disclosed elsewhere (p. 347). What Meier offers as a sympathetic appreciation of Utopianism is in effect an exercise of closure, confining the Utopian imagination within textually-approved limits. Meier has been guilty of an exercise of theoretical repression (p. 350).
A summary would not do justice to Abensour’s alternative analysis of News from Nowhere. But we should report certain of his general propositions. First, the scientific/utopian antinomy of Engels must be rejected. Second, a new kind of Utopian writing may be found among European Socialists after 1850, prefigured by Déjacque and Coeurderoy, and of which Morris is the most notable exemplar. This new Utopianism turned away from the forms of classical Utopianism—those of juridico-political model-building (p. 296) —and turned towards a more open heuristic discourse. Third, and we are now specifically taking the case of Morris, it is possible to show how, around the body of general expectations (“prévision generique”) of Marxist thought, further hypotheses as to the future might be advanced by the Utopian imagination—hypotheses which are neither Marxist nor anti-Marxist but simply “a-Marxist”. Morris could (and did) take certain Marxist propositions as his point of departure, but used these as a springboard from which his imagination made a Utopian leap (p. 277). If the major Marxist tradition has sought to reduce his insights back to their point of departure, that is because that tradition was becoming enclosed within a self-confirming doctrinal circularity.
What, then, is the function of the new Utopianism of Morris, if it brings back neither propositions which can be validated in relation to text, nor offers, in the classical way, a strict societal model? Communism (as Morris saw it) involved the subversion of bourgeois society and a reversal of the whole order of social life: “the attainment of that immediate end will bring about such a prodigious and overwhelming change in society, that those of us with a grain of imagination in them cannot help speculating as to how we shall live then.”68 It was not Morris’s intention, in any of his Utopian writings, to offer either doctrine or systematic description of the future society (pp. 295–6). He was often deliberately evasive as to “arrangements”. Exactly for this reason he drew upon his Romantic inheritance of dream and of fantasy, accentuated further by the distancing of an archaic vocabulary, instead of adopting the spurious naturalism of Bellamy. His intention was to embody in the forms of fantasy alternative values sketched in an alternative way of life (p. 298). And what distinguishes this enterprise is, exactly, its open, speculative, quality, and its detachment of the imagination from the demands of conceptual precision.69 Neither in News from Nowhere nor in such lectures as “A Factory as it might be” or “The Society of the Future” is Morris offering precise “solutions”. Nor does it even matter (as a first criterion) whether the reader approves of his approximations. Assent may be better than dissent, but more important than either is the challenge to the imagination to become immersed in the same open exploration. And in such an adventure two things happen: our habitual values (the “commonsense” of bourgeois society) are thrown into disarray. And we enter into Utopia’s proper and new-found space: the education of desire. This is not the same as “a moral education” towards a given end: it is, rather, to open a way to aspiration, to “teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire in a different way” (p. 330). Morris’s Utopianism, when it succeeds, liberates desire to an uninterrupted interrogation of our values and also to its own self-interrogation:70
“In fact, in William Morris’s case, the recourse to Utopian writing signifies exactly the desire to make a breakthrough, to risk an adventure, or an experience, in the fullest sense of the word, which allows one to glimpse, to see or even to think what a theoretical text could never, by its very nature, allow us to think, enclosed as it is within the limits of a clear and observable meaning.” (p. 347)
Nor is Abensour even willing to allow us to see this as a form of political criticism, since it is, at the deepest level, a criticism of all that we understand by “politics” (p. 341).
This remarkable study despatches the old questions into the past, and proposes new problems. Where the argument had been, “was Morris a Marxist or a not-Marxist?”, it turns out that, in a major part of his Communist propaganda, he was neither. He was somewhere else, doing something else, and the question is not so much wrong as inappropriate. This explains the difficulty which all critics, except the “repressive” M. Meier, have in reducing his Socialist writings to system; and why these unsystematic writings should still challenge in such profound ways. We may say, and should say, that Morris was a Marxist and a Utopian, but we must not allow either a hyphen or a sense of contradiction to enter between the two terms. Above all, the second term may not be reduced to the first. Nor can we allow a condescension which assumes that the “education of desire” is a subordinate part.
I welcome Abensour’s insight the more since it is the insight which, at a submerged level, structured this book when it was first written, but which I finally failed to articulate. In my emphasis upon “aspiration” within the Romantic tradition, upon “moral realism”, upon Morris’s repeated play on the word “hope”, and in the very title of Part Four (“Necessity and Desire”), I was reaching towards a conclusion which, in the end, I turned away from out of piety towards politics-as-text and timidity before the term, “utopian”. But it stares one in the face: Morris was a Communist Utopian,71 with the full force of the transformed Romantic tradition behind him.
The pin-point upon which we have been dancing has imperceptibly enlarged, until it stretches as far as eye can see on every side. To define Morris’s position as a Socialist it has proved necessary to submit Marxism itself to self-criticism: and in particular to call in question the scientific/utopian antinomy. But this self-criticism involves very much larger consequences than the local judgment as to William Morris’s relation to that tradition. Indeed, “the case of Morris” may be a critical one in diagnosing the case of post-1880 Marxism. A Marxism which could not reciprocate or live without disdain alongside Morris, or which, even while “claiming” him, sought to close what he had opened and to repress his insights, was likely to find equal difficulty in co-habiting with any other Romantic or Utopian mode. And “desire”, uneducated except in the bitter praxis of class struggle, was likely—as Morris often warned—to go its own way, sometimes for well, and sometimes for ill, but falling back again and again into the “common-sense” or habitual values of the host society. So that what may be involved, in “the case of Morris”, is the whole problem of the subordination of the imaginative Utopian faculties within the later Marxist tradition: its lack of a moral self-consciousness or even a vocabulary of desire, its inability to project any images of the future, or even its tendency to fall back in lieu of these upon the Utilitarian’s earthly paradise—the maximisation of economic growth. But this is to extend the argument further than is proper in this place. Let it suffice to say that this pin has a big enough point; and that to vindicate Morris’s Utopianism may at the same time be to vindicate Utopianism itself, and set it free to walk the world once more without shame and without accusations of bad faith.
To vindicate Utopianism (in the sense that Abensour has proposed) does not, of course, mean that any (non-classical, non-juridico-political) Utopian work is as good as any other. The “education of desire” is not beyond the criticism of sense and of feeling, although the procedures of criticism must be closer to those of creative literature than those of political theory. There are disciplined and undisciplined ways of “dreaming”, but the discipline is of the imagination and not of science. It remains to be shown that Morris’s Utopian thought survives this criticism, as well as the criticism of ninety rather sombre years. I have not changed my view that it does. Raymond Williams reached a more nuanced judgment, which has been challenged by both Abensour and John Goode. Williams wrote:
“For my own part, I would willingly lose A Dream of John Ball and the romantic socialist songs and even News from Nowhere—in all of which the weaknesses of Morris’s general poetry are active and disabling, if to do so were the price of retaining and getting people to read such smaller things as How we Live, and How we might Live, The Aims of Art, Useful Work versus Useless Toil, and A Factory as it might be. The change of emphasis would involve a change in Morris’s status as a writer, but such a change is critically inevitable. There is more life in the lectures, where one feels that the whole man is engaged in the writing, than in any of the prose and verse romances… Morris is a fine political writej, in the broadest sense, and it is on that, finally, that his reputation will rest.”72
This is not very far from my own judgment (717). Nor need the question of Utopian vision necessarily be at issue here, in the examples which Williams gives, and taking in “the broadest sense” of political writing. But Abensour fears that Williams is leaving a way open to evasion, much as I did with “Scientific Utopia”. For the judgment might easily reduce the Utopian to the political, in its customary notation (“a fine political writer”), which may then be judged by normal political canons.73
Abensour’s objection rests in part upon his own fine and close reading of News from Nowhere—oi its structure and its openness—and in part upon a criticism of Williams’s neglect of the prior Utopian tradition. But the questions may be reduced to one: why should the Utopian and the “political” works be set off against each other, when so obviously they must be taken together? Why should we be invited to pay this price at all? Williams gives up Nowhere and John Ball too easily, as perhaps Pilgrim’s Progress or Gulliver’s Travels may once have been given up by readers to whom they had become over-familiar furniture of the mind. And John Goode asks much the same question. It is fascinating to observe how Abensour and Goode, working on different materials and drawing upon the respective strengths—analytic and critical—of their respective disciplines and idioms, approach to similar conclusions.
Goode’s work is readily available and I needn’t report it at length.74 He notes of Williams’s judgment that it “suggests the right order in which to read Morris”, but that as a critical judgment it “needs to be challenged”, for such drastic devaluing of Morris’s creative writing would bring a change in his status, and Williams “does not seem to realize how great that change would be.” A similar criticism is extended to me: I also offer a “split between aesthetic and moral judgments” which “again reduces Morris’s creative work to a marginal role”.75 Goode then returns to Morris’s creative writing, from Sigurd onwards, but he doesn’t attempt to rehabilitate this within the conventional terms of literary criticism. What he does is to enquire into the problems which Morris had to surmount in the creative writing of his Socialist years. This writing should be seen as “a formal response to problems which are theoretically insoluble, except in terms of metaphors which are unsatisfactory and intractable in the actual historical situation” (p. 222). In this view Goode is close to the view of Pierson that “the fusion Morris effected between the romantic vision and Marxism”, as one consequence, “sharpened the divorce between consciousness and objective social reality which had characterized the thought of Carlyle and Ruskin.”76 The deeper Morris’s understanding became of the determinations of capitalist process, the more intransigeant became the protest against these of aspiration or “desire”, the more impossible it became to clothe these aspirations within contemporary forms, and the more urgent it became for “desire” to master “necessity”, Goode shares my view that despair, rather than vision, moved Morris in the first place towards revolutionary Socialism (p. 235); and while Marxism “gives his vision an historical basis, the central concept of his socialist ideology is one which has been with him from the beginning, alienation” (p. 2 3 6).77 Not only are we entitled to use “alienation” in an analytic rather than merely descriptive way, but Goode shows that Morris was very conscious of this diagnosis, as when he wrote that “civilization has bred desires which she forbids us to satisfy, and so is not merely a niggard but a torturer also”, or that “all civilization has cultivated our sensibility only to disappoint it” (p. 236).78 Thus Morris faced this contradiction, in a tension brought about by a vision of a Socialist future which “is in some way beyond immediate consciousness although in theoretical terms it is conceivable” (p. 238),—a tension expressed also in his own work (which Goode suggests is the true subject of the later creative writing) between “the vision of the historical potential” and the humdrum or depressing actualities of the movement. Faced with contradictions between Socialist aspiration and the overwhelming presence of capitalist actuality (with its “common-sense” signalling at every turn the “impossibility” of Socialist realisation) a general reaction within the Marxist tradition was (as Gramsci saw) a relapse into mechanical predestinarían determinism—a stamina fortified by a faith in the inevitability of the victory of “the Cause”.79 It is not only that Morris, perhaps increasingly, doubted such determinism or evolutionism;80 it is also, as Goode very well notes, a pseudo-resolution of the problem of alienation: a resolution (or “Revolution”) “achieved by forces outside himself: man’s alienation will be brought to an end by alien forces” (p. 270). It is in the face of these contradictions that we should see how Morris’s works “attempt, with much success, to find a mode in which the creative mind can be portrayed in its determined and determining relationship to historical actuality” (p. 222), and also how people themselves may be seen “as a determining as well as determined force” (p. 271).
This can’t be done, however, within the received forms of realism. It is therefore inevitable and right that Morris should turn to new account his old Romantic inheritance of dream. “The affirmation of the responsibility of dream in a world in which consciousness has become ineradicably dislocated from the field of its existence is an assumed feature of all of Morris’s socialist writings” (p. 239).
The test of Goode’s defence of Morris’s practice must depend not on this argument (although this argument puts us into the right critical relation to the works) but upon Goode’s own very close criticism of particular works. This includes a remarkable revaluation of Sigurd the Volsung, which reveals hitherto unperceived levels of complexity of mythic organization in the work, but which leaves me not wholly convinced;81 a very rich, subtle, and convincing analysis of A Dream of John Ball; and a significant reappraisal of The House of the Wolfings. In my view, although differences of local judgment of course remain, Goode emphatically sustains his challenge to Williams and myself. Henceforward these works and the “political writings” must be taken together.
But what are they to be taken as? It’s here that Goode approaches to the same solution as that of Abensour, but (as it seems to me) finally takes alarm and backs away. Goode also challenges the term “Scientific Utopia”; but, as it turns out, he does so because he finds that News from Nowhere may neither be described adequately as “Scientific” nor as “Utopia”. The work is primarily “not so much a picture of enacted values as a reversal of the rejected values of modern life” (p. 277), and it expresses the exhaustion and even pessimism in the mind of its author: “Nowhere is nowhere except as a conceptual antithesis in the mind of an exhausted activist.” But why, in these clauses, does Goode insist upon such an opposition? Is it possible, in this kind of work, to reject present values without enacting alternatives? How can one be done without the other? Perhaps the weight falls on “antithesis”: Nowhere’s values are those of the not-present, or anti-present, they are not boldly imagined ex nihilo ? But it has to be shown, first, that this is so (as Goode does not); and second, that a Utopian writer can proceed in any other way than by re-ordering the values of present or past, or by proposing antitheses to these. What Goode seems to be doing is, like so many before him, and like myself in 1955, running away from the acceptance of Utopianism as a valid imaginative form, because of a fright given to us by Engels in 1880.82 Goode therefore concentrates upon one component only of News from Nowhere (the “never-ending contrast” between future, past and present, which, as I noted (695), is essential to the work’s structure) at the expense of all others:
“It seems to me that we have, in this novel, much less a Utopia than an account of the agony of holding the mind together, committed as it is to the conscious determinants of history and the impersonal forces of change—united only in conceptual terms.” (p. 278)
So that, in conclusion, Goode can say that he has identified the achievement in the last creative works in that Morris “discovers forms which dramatize the tensions of the revolutionary mind”. This is a part of the truth, especially of John Ball, and Goode is the first to have identified this part so well. But is News from Nowhere really to be read, responsively, only as an “agony”? And is this not a somewhat cerebral account of a work which does, indeed, enact alternative values? At least it seems a somewhat introverted judgment (“the tensions of the revolutionary mind”) upon a work which succeeded rather well in communicating something very different to an audience not given to the intellectual’s narcissistic obsession with his own mental agonies.83
I may well be wrong: but it seems to me that Goode has come to a conclusion at odds with his own evidence, and that he has done so because he leaves the problem of Utopianism unexamined. For earlier in his study he moves very close to the positions of Abensour. He warns that there is nothing “facile” in Morris’s use of dream “as a convention within which to realize concretely socialist insight”. Morris’s use of dream is “not polemical but exploratory” (p. 246), and, again, he uses it:
“… not in order to escape the exigencies of the depressing actuality but in order to insist on a whole structure of values and perspectives which must emerge in the conscious mind in order to assert the inner truth of that actuality, and give man the knowledge of his own participation in the historical process which dissolves that actuality.” (p. 270)
This is, almost, to rehabilitate Utopianism. But not quite. For there is a little fuzz of evasion. Utopia is accepted as “convention” to realize “insight”, and dream allows perspectives to emerge “in the conscious mind” which afford “knowledge”. (We recall Goode’s judgment that “Nowhere” is a “conceptual antithesis” and the work enacts an agony of the “mind”.) What one notes is a certain tendency to intellectualise art, and to insist that it can be validated only when translated into terms of knowledge, consciousness and concept: art seen, not as an enactment of values, but as a re-enactment in different terms of theory. What is lost is Abensour’s insistence upon “the education of desire”. “The role of Morris’s art”, Goode writes, “seems increasingly to be one which combats the tendency to collapse into a determinist act of faith by presenting the potentialities of human growth in a situation in which it is enabled and compelled to take the initiative” (p. 261). This is fine, and what this expresses is, precisely, the Utopian “leap”. If Goode has lingered over “initiative” he might have concluded, with Abensour, that one part of Morris’s achievement lies in the open, exploratory character of Utopianism: its leap out of the kingdom of necessity into an imagined kingdom of freedom in which desire may actually indicate choices or impose itself as need; and in its innocence of system and its refusal to be cashed in the same medium of exchange as “concept”, “mind”, “knowledge” or political text.
Whether Utopianism succeeds in what it offers must in each work be submitted to the test of local criticism. And Goode’s criticism of A Dream of John Ball is by far the best appreciation (and vindication) of any of Morris’s Socialist works of art. His work, taken together with Abensour’s, carries Morris studies into different territory. These bring, at last, news from somewhere new. That is what is important.
In this review, both of my own work and of Morris studies over the past twenty-one years, I’ve concentrated perhaps overmuch on one problem: the Morris/Marxism relation. I think that this is where the significant questions lie. The older attempts to assimilate Morris to Labourism, or even to Fabianism, were given a check long ago. Very clearly, the course which British Labourism has pursued in this century has not only departed from the perspectives advocated by Morris, but has led into exactly that general deadlock which he foresaw. The people must “take over for the good of the community all the means of production: i.e. credit, railways, mines, factories, shipping, land, machinery,” he wrote to a correspondent in 1884: “Any partial scheme elaborated as a scheme which implies the existence with it side by side of the ordinary commercial competition is doomed to fail… it will be sucked into the tremendous stream of commercial production and vanish into it, after having played its part as a red-herring to spoil the scent of revolution.”84 In “The Policy of Abstention” in 1887 he envisaged, with some precision, the course of a parliamentary Labourism which fell into the errors of “depending on parliamentary agitation”, which did not support “a great organization outside parliament actively engaged in reconstructing society” and which would move “earth & sea to fill the ballot boxes with Socialist votes which will not represent Socialist men’” (460). At about the same time he wrote:
“They are already beginning… to stumble about with attempts at State Socialism. Let them make their experiments and blunders, and prepare the way for us by so doing… We—sect or party, or group of self-seekers, madmen, and poets, which you will—are at least the only set of people who have been able to see that there is and has been a great class-struggle going on. Further, we can see that this class-struggle cannot come to an end till the classes themselves do: one class must absorb the other.”85
Morris already at that time envisaged “experiments” leading on to a “transitional condition” which reads uncomfortably like some passages in the history of this century:
“Attempts at bettering the condition of the workers will be made, which will result in raising one group of them at the expense of another, will create a new middle-class and a new proletariat; but many will think the change the beginning of the millenium… This transitional condition will be chiefly brought about by the middle-class, the owners of capital themselves, partly in ignorant good-will towards the proletariat (as long as they do not understand its claims), partly with the design both conscious and unconscious, of making our civilization hold out a little longer against the incoming flood of corruption on the one hand, and revolution on the other.”86
In his last years Morris became reconciled to the inevitability of the course upon which Labourism was set. But, in his final lectures, he asked repeatedly “how far the betterment of the working people might go and yet stop short at last without having made any progress on the direct road to Communism?”
“Whether, in short, the tremendous organization of civilized commercial society is not playing the cat and mouse game with us socialists. Whether the Society of Inequality might not accept the quasi-socialist machinery… and work it for the purpose of upholding that society in a somewhat shorn condition, maybe, but a safe one… The workers better treated, better organized, helping to govern themselves, but with no more pretence to equality with the rich, nor any more hope of it than they have now.”87
What are being counterposed here are the alternative notions of Equality of Opportunity, within a competitive society: and of a Society of Equals, a Socialist community. Utopianism suddenly reveals itself as more realistic than “science”, the exploratory historical imagination overleaps its own circumstances and searches the dilemmas of our own time with a moral insight so searching that it can be mistaken as callous. “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”(718).
We have to make up our minds about William Morris. Either he was an eccentric, isolated figure, personally-admirable, but whose major thought was wrong or irrelevant and long left behind by events. This could be so, although it needn’t mean that we must dismiss his subsidiary interests and emphases. He will always remain of major importance in the history of the decorative arts and in the narrative history of British Socialism. And certain other themes can be taken out of his writings, which will swim up now and then into revitalised discourse: thus it has recently been noted (remarkable discovery!) that he is a pioneer of responsible “ecological” consciousness, and it has never been forgotten that he had definite and uncomfortable views on the question of work.88 On the other hand, it may be that Morris was a major intellectual figure. As such he may be seen as our greatest diagnostician of alienation, in terms of the concrete perception of the moralist and within the context of a particular English cultural tradition. And if he was that, then he remains a contemporary figure. And it then must be important to establish the relation in which he stands to contemporary thought. And if the British Labour movement has now reached, rather exactly, the deadlock which, some ninety years ago, he foresaw, then we can expect an intense renewal of interest in his work and a number of claimants to his inheritance to come forward.
The most plausible, and most vocal, claimant is “Marxism”, and that is why my discussion has turned on this point. I must confess that, when I first read M. Meier, I was thrown into depression. It seemed that one had extricated Morris, twenty-one years ago, from an anti-Marxist myth, only to see him assimilated curtly within a myth of Marxist orthodoxy. The result was not only repressive, it was also distancing and boring—Morris’s portrait might now be hung safely on the wall, with The Critique of the Gotha Programme on his lap. But since Meier was only writing out at large certain pieties and evasions in my own original treatment, I hardly had the heart to enter the argument again. Thanks to M. Abensour and Mr. Goode I’ve got back my morale. We can now see that Morris may be assimilated to Marxism only in the course of a process of self-criticism and re-ordering within Marxism itself.
The question turns upon Morris’s independent derivation of Communism out of the logic of the Romantic tradition; upon the character of his Utopianism; and upon the relations in which the moral sensibility stands to political consciousness. “My Socialism began”, he wrote, “where that of some others ended, with an intense desire for complete equality of condition for all men”. And “I became a Communist before I knew anything about the history of Socialism or its immediate aims”. It was at this point that he turned to Marx and became “a practical Socialist”—“in short I was born again”.89 But to be born again did not mean renouncing his own parentage. “Ideal” and “science” continued to co-exist and to argue with each other.
“Equality is in fact our ideal”, he said, and “I can only explain the fact that some socialists do not put this before them steadily by supposing that their eager pursuit of the means have somewhat blinded them to the end.” This was aimed at the Fabians, whom he was then addressing.90 In one sense this ideal could be defined simply as a negation of class society: Socialism aims at “the full development of human life set free from artificial regulations in favour of a class”.91 The implicit underlying metaphor, drawing upon the old Romantic critique of Utilitarianism, is the “organic” one: the natural growth of “life” will be set free from the artificial (or “mechanical”) constraints of “civilization”. Fulfilled Communist society will not depend upon a new race arising of morally-admirable people but upon the growth of a communal value-system made habitual by the absence of private property in the means of production and the attendant competition for the means of life. In “Nowhere” a “habit of life”, “a habit of acting on the whole for the best” has “been growing on us”—“it is easy for us to live without robbing each other.” (697) In this sense, the alternative value-systems of capitalism and socialism are seen, in ways which some contemporary anthropologists might approve, as being both supportive to and supported by the organization of economic and social life.
But this is not quite all that Morris is saying. For in another sense, his use of moral criteria and his assertions of “ideal” ends and of prior values, is indicative also: it indicates a direction towards which historical development may move, suggests choices between alternative directions, asserts a preference between these choices, and seeks to educate others in his preferences. These indications are never absolute and “utopian” in that sense: Morris never proposes that men may live in any way they may suppose that they might choose, according to any value-system imaginable. The indications are placed within a firm controlling historical and political argument. But they are certainly there and they are important. They are perhaps an occasion for Engels’s dismissal of him as a “sentimental Socialist”—an accusation which left Morris pugnaciously unrepentant (“I am a sentimentalist… and I am proud of the title” (718)). They indicate where a crack lies between Morris’s avowed and conscious positions and a moral determinism (from these relations of production, these values and this consonant morality) which has occupied much Marxist thought. In Morris’s critique of capitalist society, there is no sense in which morality is seen as secondary, power and productive relations as primary. The ugliness of Victorian social relations and “the vulgarities of civilization” were “but the outward expression of the innate moral baseness into which we are forced by our present form of society…”92 This moral baseness was “innate”, within the societal form: “economics” and “morality” were enmeshed in the same nexus of systematised social relationships, and from this nexus an economic and a moral logic must ensue.
It must follow that the revolt against this logic must equally be “economic” and “moral” in character. But a moral revolt, no less than an economic one, must have somewhere to go, somewhere to point towards. And pointing must involve choosing, not between any direction one likes, but between inflexions of direction. When Morris looked forward to the society of the future, he proposed that a quarrel between desire and utilitarian determinations would continue, and that desire must and could assert its own priorities. For to suppose that our desires must be determined by our material needs may be to assume a notion of “need” itself already determined by the expectations of existing society.93 But desire also can impose itself as “need”: in class society it may be felt in the form of alienation, desire unsatisfied: in the society of the future in the form of more open choices between needs:
“We may have in appearance to give up a great deal of what we have been used to call material progress, in order that we may be freer, happier and more completely equal.”94
And he went on, in the same lecture, to warn that differential rewards and “different standards of livelihood” accorded to different kinds of work would “create fresh classes, enslave the ordinary man, and give rise to parasitical groups”, ensuing in “the creation of a new parasitical and servile class”. With a quizzical glance at the determinism of evolutionary theory, he concluded:
“My hope is, that now we know, or have been told that we have been evolved from unintelligent germs (or whatever the word is) we shall consciously resist the reversal of the process, which to some seems inevitable, and do our best to remain men, even if in the struggle we become barbarians.”95
“Civilization” and “barbarism” were terms which he always employed with ironic inversion, drawing in part upon the inheritance from Carlyle and Ruskin, in part upon the very deep commitment he had learned for certain pre-capitalist values and modes. To “become barbarians” alarmed him not at all. “ ‘Civilization’ “ (he wrote to Geòrgie Burne-Jones in May 1885) “I know now is doomed to destruction”. This “knowledge” is what he had gained as “a practical Socialist”, thus being saved from “a fine pessimistic end of life” (175). But the assent of desire had preceded this knowledge. “What a joy it is to think of it!”, his letter to Geòrgie continued:
“And how often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world,-and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies. With this thought in my mind all the history of the past is lighted up and lives again to me. I used really to despair once because I thought what the idiots of our day call progress would go on perfecting itself…”96
It is not a comfortable passage, after the barbarism of blood and race into which twentieth-century “civilization” in fact debouched. True, Morris would have seen this outcome, which indeed he almost predicted (“the doom of Blood and Iron in our own day” (720)),, as being no barbarism in his sense, but an authentic outcome of the logic of capitalist “civilization”. But that is a little too easy as a way out from the accusation that Morris, like other alienated intellectuals, was allowing his outraged aesthetic feelings to commit him to a dangerous course of emotional arson. And we have to put his private comment to Geòrgie together with other private and public evidence to take a full measure. For if Morris was emphatically a revolutionary Socialist, he didn’t suppose that “the Revolution” would, at one throw, “liberate” some mass of healthy “barbarism”, some underground reserves of repressed desire. And if he toyed with such notions on his first commitment to “the Cause” between 1883 and 1885,97 he was rescued from any revolutionary Romanticism (of the Swinburne variety) exactly by the sobering experience of very hard and applied mundane political agitation. Neither his audiences nor his comrades in the quarrelling Socialist sects were “barbarians” of that kind; nor, as he knew far better than most Victorian intellectuals, out of his immense practical experience in the decorative arts, was the “ordinary man in the street” an unspoiled vessel of true barbaric art (“Let us once for all get rid of the idea of the mass of the people having an intuitive idea of Art” (666)).. The false consciousness of “civilization” was not seen by him as masking some healthy proletarian Unconscious. Necessity itself would impell the workers into struggle, but this struggle could attain no goal unless the goal was located by desire and a strategy for its attainment prescribed by Socialist theory. First we must have “courage enough to will”; “conscious hope” must match the response to “commercial ruin” (428). Moreover, if Socialists failed to educate desire, and to enlarge this conscious hope, “to sustain steadily their due claim to that fullness and completeness of life which no class system can give them”, then they would the more easily fall victim of the “humbug” of “a kind of utilitarian sham Socialism” (429). Or, if the existing society failed to provide even that, and “if we give it all up into the hands of necessity”, the result will be a volcanic disaster (724).98 The end itself was unobtainable without the prior education of desire or “need”. And science cannot tell us what to desire or how to desire. Morris saw it as a task of Socialists (his own first task) to help people to find out their wants, to encourage them to want more, to challenge them to want differently, and to envisage a society of the future in which people, freed at last of necessity, might choose between different wants. “It is to stir you up not to be contented with a little that I am here tonight” (361).
When I say that Morris may be assimilated to Marxism only in the course of a re-ordering of Marxism itself, I don’t of course imply that Marxist thinkers have not noticed these problems or proposed solutions. But it is in this area that (I think) the problem still lies. And “the case of Morris”, and Marxism’s bewilderment before it, emphasises that the problem is unresolved. Moreover, it should now be clear that there is a sense in which Morris, as a Utopian and moralist, can never be assimilated to Marxism, not because of any contradiction of purposes but because one may not assimilate desire to knowledge, and because the attempt to do so is to confuse two different operative principles of culture. So that I’ve phrased the problem wrongly, and Marxism requires less a re-ordering of its parts than a sense of humility before those parts of culture which it can never order. The motions of desire may be legible in the text of necessity, and may then become subject to rational explanation and criticism. But such criticism can scarcely touch these motions at their source. “Marxism”, on its own, we now know, has never made anyone “good” or “bad”, although a faith, arising from other sources but acclaimed as Marxism, has sustained epic courage, and a bad faith, arising from other sources but acclaimed as Marxism, has defiled the first premises of Marx. So that what Marxism might do, for a change, is sit on its own head a little in the interests of Socialism’s heart. It might close down one counter in its universal pharmacy, and cease dispensing potions of analysis to cure the maladies of desire. This might do good politically as well, since it would allow a little space, not only for literary Utopians, but also for the unprescribed initiatives of everyday men and women who, in some part of themselves, are also alienated and Utopian by turns.
This won’t be how all other readers see it. So it is time for me to get out of Morris’s way, and put this book to bed. I shan’t revise it again. It must now stand like this, for people to use as they will. If they want to use it as a quarry, that’s all right. The bits of Morris are what matter. But I would hope that one part of its structure—the part least noted by its critics—might receive a little attention before it is pulled down: that is, the analysis of Romanticism and of its trajectory in Morris’s life. I don’t mean only the way in which Morris rejected the reactionary “Feudal Socialism” of Carlyle and turned to new account the Ruskin of “The Nature of Gothic”. I mean, even more, the trajectory from the profoundly-subjective Romanticism of Keats (in which aspiration, denied of realisation, circulated between the integrity of the artist and the ideal artefact of Beauty), through the sublimated rebellion of The Defence of Guenevere, to the crisis of despair of The Earthly Paradise, in which all the values of subjective individualism were poisoned by the taint of mortality; and thence, through the recuperative societal myths of Icelandic saga, to the Socialist resolution.
This trajectory may be viewed from two aspects. In Morris’s own poetry it appears as fragmentary and suggestive, but as unfulfilled. His aesthetic premises were modified least of all, and his devotion to pre-capitalist achievements in the visual and architectural arts re-inforced his stubborn attachment to Keatsian and Pre-Raphaelite notions of “Beauty”. This led him to his rash attempt to invent (or re-invent) a language which would put at a distance Victorian society. From this aspect we can see how Morris intended the arch of his creative writing to go. But, as I’ve argued sufficiently, his premises were wrong, and to attempt to “make a new tongue” in that way was to disengage from, rather than to challenge, the sensibility of his time. The attempt succeeded only when it was matched by the form of dream, when disengagement was itself a means by which criticism of the age’s common-sense could be brought to bear.
From another aspect the arch is that of aspiration fulfilled. Morris’s youthful Romantic rebellion was not a rebellion of individual sensibility against “society”, but a rebellion of value, or aspiration, against actuality. When he stood, with young Burne-Jones, entranced by his first sight of medieval Rouen, what seized him like a passion was the sense of a whole alternative way of life: “no words can tell you how its mingled beauty, history, and romance took hold on me” (4). This mingled sense was the accent which he gave to Romanticism, and in later years he specifically identified this sense with the historical consciousness:
“As for romance, what does romance mean? I have heard people miscalled for being romantic, but what romance means is the capacity for a true conception of history, a power of making the past part of the present”99
Nor was this sense confined to reverie; Morris’s close practical knowledge of the medieval craftsman’s mode of work gave to it an unusual substance. But it also threw into deeper shadow the actuality of his own society, in which both the values and the artefacts of the past were doomed to decay. This nourished the pessimism—the impulse to use art as a means of escape—of his early middle years. And I remain convinced that these were years of despair, and that the acute sense of mortality within a purposeless social universe was sapping the very sources of Morris’s psychic life. When his arduous quest ended in Socialist conclusions, he was able, in one motion, to re-appropriate that “power of making the past part of the present” and extend it into an imagined future. The aspirations of the past were themselves infused with new meaning: “the past is lighted up and lives again to me.” For the present, “I did not measure my hope, nor the joy it brought me” (126). The old fear of death relaxed, as aspiration was extended, vicariously, into the future: when he imagined that society, he asked, not “How Will They Live?”, but “How Shall We Live Then?” The trajectory was completed. And what was transformed was, not only his tradition, but his own personality and sensibility. So that we may see in William Morris, not a late Victorian, nor even a “contemporary”, but a new kind of sensibility. If he sometimes appears as an isolated and ill-understood figure, that is because few men or women of his kind were then about—or have happened since.
If I write about Morris again it will be in my character, not as historian, but as Socialist. For I must set one misunderstanding at rest. It might seem that, in the revaluation proposed in this Postscript, I’ve been setting myself up as yet one more “claimant” of Morris, in the attempt to attach him to an idiosyncratic Thompsonian position. But the case is the reverse. Morris, by 1955, had claimed me. My book was then, I suppose, already a work of muffled “revisionism”. The Morris/Marx argument has worked inside me ever since. When, in 1956, my disagreements with orthodox Marxism became fully articulate, I fell back on modes of perception which I’d learned in those years of close company with Morris, and I found, perhaps, the will to go on arguing from the pressure of Morris behind me. To say that Morris claimed me, and that I’ve tried to acknowledge that claim, gives me no right to claim him. I have no license to act as his interpreter. But at least I can now say that this is what I’ve been trying, for twenty years, to do.
August, 1976.
NOTES
1 Detroit, 1969.
2 Paul Meier, “An Unpublished Lecture of William Morris: ‘How Shall We Live Then?’ ”, International Review of Social History, XVI, 1971, Part 2: “Justice and Socialism”, extended notes for a lecture in 1885, in Appendix I to Paul Meier, La Pensee Utopique de William Morris (Paris, 1972).
3 In R. Page Arnot, William Morris, the Man and the Myth (1964). Professor Norman Kelvin of the Department of English, City College, City University of New York, N.Y. 10031, has for some ten years been assembling materials for a full collection of letters. Anyone with knowledge of unpublished letters is invited to get in touch with him.
4 Peter Faulkner (ed.), William Morris: The Critical Heritage (1973).
5 Asa Briggs (ed.), William Morris: Selected Writings and Designs (1962); A.L. Morton (ed.), Political Writings of William Morris (1973).
6 Unfortunately Floud’s early death robbed us of his full conclusions: but see his articles in the Listener, October 7th & 14th, 1954; “Dating Morris Patterns”, Architectural Review, July 1959; “English Chintz: the Influence of William Morris”, CIBA Review, 1961.
7 Paul Thompson, The Work of William Morris (1967); Ray Watkinson, William Morris as Designer (1967). Also Graeme Shankland in (ed.) Asa Briggs, op. cit.,; R. Furneaux Jordan, The Medieval Vision of William Morris (1960); AC. Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle (New Haven, 1975); E. Goldzamt, William Morris et La Genese Sociale de L Architecture Moderne (Warsaw, 1967).
8 Warington Taylor, Victoria & Albert Museum, Reserve Case JJ35; Sir Thomas Wardle, V. & A. Box II 86. zz. See especially Philip Henderson, William Morris: His Life, Work and Friends (1967: Penguin edition 1973), pp. 105–12 (Taylor) and pp. 193–5 (letters to Wardle on dyeing).
9 Some minute-books of Morris & Co. are in the Hammersmith Public Library. Account-books, pattern-books and other materials of the Firm are now in the private collection of Sanford and Helen Berger at their home in Carmel near San Francisco. It is unfortunate that the Firm’s records should be divided by the Atlantic and between public and private hands. But scholars who can get to California will find (as I have done) that the present owners of these records are generous in providing access to them.
10 William Morris, Writer (William Morris Society, 1961). A brief essay in general interpretation by George Levine in (eds.) H.J. Dyos and M. Wolff, The Victorian City (1973), II, pp. 495–517, is also fresh and perceptive.
11 Disagreement has been expressed by Jessie Kocmanova, “Some Remarks on E.P. Thompson’s Opinions of the Poetry of William Morris”, Philologica Pragensia, III, 3, 1960, and in The Poetic Maturing of William Morris (Prague, 1964). But I have not been convinced by her critical re-appraisals.
12 CS. Lewis, Rehabilitations and Other Essays (Oxford, 1939).
13 Notably John Goode’s work, discussed below. Also Lionel Munby, “William Morris’s Romances and the Society of the Future”, Zeitschrift fur Anglistik u. Amerikanistik, X, 1, 1962. I find Jessie Kocmanova’s studies on A Dream of John Ball and on the late prose romances more helpful than her studies of Morris’s poetry: see Brno Studies in English, II, no. 68, 1960 and VI, no. 109, 1966.
14 July 15th, 1955.
15 Jack Lindsay, who had the benefit of Henderson’s work, as well as Meier’s, also offers some perceptive suggestions in his helter-skelter biography: William Morris: His Life and Work (1975).
16 See Henderson, op. cit, pp. 124–5; C. Doughty and Robert Wahl (eds.), Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Oxford, 1965), II, p. 685; Penelope Fitzgerald, Edward Bume-Jones (1975), esp. chapter 10.
17 “Has Top perhaps thrown trade after poetry, & now executes none but wholesale orders in philanthropy,—the retail trade being beneath a true humanitarian? But no—without a shop he could not be the Odger of the Future!”: D.G. Rossetti to Janey Morris, April 1st, 1878, cited in Jack Lindsay, William Morris, pp. 224–5. George Odger, the shoemakers leader, had repeatedly fought parliamentary elections, with strong support, against both Liberal and Conservative candidates, on a Radical working-men’s platform: he had died in 1877.
18 Morris to W. Bell Scott, April 9th, 1882, cited in Philip Henderson, op. cit., p. 260.
19 This judgment of mine is perhaps smug in the light of the full surviving correspondence between Rossetti and Janey Morris which has become available while these pages were in proof: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence, ed. John Bryson (Oxford, 1976). Unrevealing in some ways, these letters (the bulk of them from Rossetti) do appear to disclose the general shape of the relationship. There are several letters of 1868-70, when the mutual passion of Janey and Rossetti appears to be first fully disclosed. In 1869 Janey had her first breakdown and Morris took her to recuperate at Ems: the three friends appear to have been attempting to live through the triangular situation with mutual affection and confessional frankness: “All that concerns you” (Rossetti wrote to Janey at Ems, July 1869) “is the all absorbing question with me, as dear Top will not mind my telling you at this anxious moment. The more he loves vou, the more he knows that you are too lovely and noble not to be loved…” In whatever way the three friends attempted to “handle” the situation, it seems clear that the attempt broke down. No letters survive for the yeara of crisis, 1870-75. These are the years of Morris’s two Icelandic journeys—years when Janey and Rossetti were often together at Kelmscott. By the time the correspondence resumes in 1877, a sad change has come over the situation. Gabriel is preparing to move out of Kelmscott and there are no more friendly messages (and a few sneers) for “Top”. Janey appears to have entered a settled melancholia and hypochondria (the symptoms mentioned include lumbago, sciatica, neuralgia, migraine, sore throats, fevers) which matches the melancholia of Rossetti. “I hope”, Gabriel writes on Christmas Eve 1879, “you will have a Xmas not too unlike a merry one.” In her reply Janey says nothing about her Christmas, but writes of her daughter May: “she is excessively delicate this winter, and I think will not drag through a long life. So much the better for her!”. (May was in fact to live well into her seventies). It is altogether a sad correspondence, of two self-preoccupied people conjoined by a melancholy retrospective obsession, redeemed by reciprocal concern and respect. Much of the nature of the relationship remains anclear; one does not know how far to credit the statement of Hall Caine (which Meier has brought to light) that Rossetti told him that he had been made impotent by a serious accident (at some time during these years?); moreover, the letters reveal little of the paradoxes of Rossetti’s own feeling and behaviour (his mistress, Fanny Cornforth, is never mentioned). It is clear only that the relationship falls easily into no stereotype, and that an emotional distance had opened up between Morris on one hand and Janey and Rossetti on the other.
20 H.M. Hyndman and British Socialism (Oxford, 1961). For London, see also Paul Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour: The Struggle for London, 18851914 (1967), and (for class relations generally) Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, 1971).
21 See my review in the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, no. 3, Autumn 1961, pp. 66–71.
22 C. Tsuzuki, The Life of Eleanor Marx, 1855-1898 (Oxford, 1967).
23 Eleanor Marx: Family Life, 1855-83 (1972). This volume introduces Eleanor fully and also introduces Aveling.
24 S. Pierson, “Ernest Belfort Bax: the Encounter of Marxism and Late Victorian Culture”, Journal of British Studies, 1972; Laurence Thompson, The Enthusiasts (1971)—on Bruce and Katherine Glasier; W.J. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 1875-1914. New information on the Labour Emancipation League, Frank Kitz and other London pioneers is in Stan Shipley, Club Life and Socialism in Mid-Victorian London (History Workshop,.’1972), and on London anarchism in Rudolf Rocker, The London Years (1956).
25 Tom Mann and his Times (1965).
26 “Homage to Tom Maguire”, in Asa Briggs and John Saville (eds.), Essays in Labour History (1960).
27 Especially A.M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884-1918 (Cambridge, 1962); Margaret Cole, The Story of Fabian Socialism (1961); E.J. Hobsbawm, “The Fabians Reconsidered” in Labouring Men (1964). Also Wolfe and Pierson (discussed below).
28 The new sources on Shaw and the relations between Fabians and Socialist League in 1886, are discussed in Appendix II.
29 James W. Hulse, Revolutionists in London (Oxford, 1970), p. 27.
30 Willard Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism: Men and Ideas in the Formation of Fabian and Socialist Doctrines (New Haven, 1975), p. 320.
31 J.Y. Le Bourgeois, “William Morris and the Marxist Myth”, Durham University Journal, December 1976.
32 I have taken out certain passages (e.g. first edition, pp. 735–46) not because I apologise for them in 1955 but because they are not relevant to 1976.
33 In fact my book was better received than most books from Lawrence & Wishart (a Communist publishing-house), getting a generous notice from G.D.H. Cole in the Listener and a knockabout, but not unfair, criticism from A.J.P. Taylor in the Manchester Guardian.
34 July 15th, 1955.
35 Oxford, 1970.
36 By contrast Hulse offers Lloyd Wendell Eshleman (alias Lloyd Eric Grey), A Victorian Rebel: The Life of William Morris (New York, 1940: and, under a different title and different author, London, 1949) as “the most readily available general biography for the past quarter century… based on competent researcn and a sympathetic understanding of Morris”. For Mackail’s opinion, in 1940, as to Eshleman’s “lack of sincerity”, see Meier, op. cit., p. 303. I dissected Eshleman/Grey’s nauseous and thoroughly dishonest book in “The Murder of William Morris”, Arena, April-May 19.51; and abused it further in first edition, pp. 741–3.
37 Hulse notes (p. 17) that the S.D.F., League and Fabians “filled the columns of their respective periodicals with criticisms of the other organizations”: this is rubbish, most of all for Commonweal Of Bloody Sunday he notes, “it… needed only a few officers to disperse the crowd” (p. 93). And so on.
38 Ithaca and London, 1973.
39 This point is made forcefully in Keith Nield’s review of Pierson in the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, no. 27, Autumn 1973.
40 Nor need it follow that we must endorse all of Althusser’s notions of “rupture”. I do not.
41 We have been reminded that Hyndman’s ideas were not co-terminous with those of the whole S.D.F.: see E.J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men.
42 See Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, (Cambridge, U.S.A., 1960).
43 Cf. Morris: “I am not pleading for the production of a little more beauty in the world, much as I love it, and much as I would sacrifice for its sake; it is the lives of human beings I am pleading for…”, “Art and its Producers” (1888); “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. I say it is the aims of art that you must seek rather than the art itself; and in that search we may find ourselves in a world blank and bare, as a result of our caring at least this much for art, that we will not endure the shams of it”, “The Aims of Art” (1886). See also the letter on the miners’ strike of 1893, “The Deeper Meaning of the Struggle”, in Letters, pp. 355–7 and above, 665.
44 See pp. 274–5. Also p. 84, where Morris is held to have tended to refuse to acknowledge “those forces in life, formerly categorized as the sinful or the tragic”.
45 When I say “more than any other of his time”, I am thinking of British Socialists. But it isn’t easy to suggest European comparisons, unless we move to cosmic (non-Socialist) pessimists. If Engels in his last years allowed himself to confront a similar pessimistic realism, he kept it to himself.
46 Pierson is fond of this term “regressive”. In another place (The Victorian City, eds. H.J. Dyos and M. Wolff, 1972, II., p. 879) he has Morris trying to rescue “the rural vision” by “attaching it to Marxism”. “Ideological impulses within Marxism encouraged the project, but it was incompatible with the social and economic realism of that system of thought and it soon collapsed. In Morris’s Socialism the Romantic regression ended virtually in anarchism…” The “collapse” here is not of Morris’s thought but of Pierson’s more nuanced appraisal in the book under discussion.
47 I prefer the term “transformation” to the term “extension”, employed by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society (1958), p. 158, since it insists upon “rupture” as well as continuity. I argued the point rather loudly in a review of The Long Revolution in New Left Review, 9 & 10, May/June & July/August 1961, to be reprinted shortly in my political essays (Merlin Press, 1977). Any differences between myself and Williams have (I think) diminished over the years, and neither of us would argue in exactly the same way today. The choice of terms is unimportant, but the point remains of interest.
48 An English edition of La Pensée Utopique de William Morris (Paris, 1972) is announced as forthcoming from the Harvester Press.
49 See also Meier, “Friedrich Engels et William Morris”, La Pensée, no. 156, Avril, 1971, pp. 68–80.
50 F. Engels and Paul & Laura Lafargue, Correspondence (Moscow, 1959), 2 vols.
51 As early as July 24th, 1884 Morris wrote to Robert Thompson: “I believe (and have always done so)… that the most important thing to press… at present is the legal reduction of the working day: every working man can see the immediate advantage to him of this: the Trades Unions may be got to take it up…” This would become “an international affair” Letters, p. 205. When the Marxists of the Bloomsbury Branch split from the League they put their best efforts exactly into the Eight Hour agitation, and not into parliamentary candidatures. Had they made this their main plank while still within the League, no break would have been necessary.
52 In brief, Commonweal (January 7th, 1888) publicised the exposure in the Sozial-Demokrat of 13 German police-spies, one of whom, Reuss, lived in England. Reuss commenced an action; Engels noted that Morris was “funky” but tried to collect evidence to support a defence. When the case was lost, Morris appears to have been allowed to carry the damages and costs out of his own purse.
53 I find helpful the suggestion that The House of the Wolfings, and Morris’s articles on “The Development of Modern Society” in Commonweal (1890) may have drawn upon ideas in The Origin of the Family, derived from conversations with Engels or with Bax. But it still has to be shown that Morris was drawing upon Engels rather than (as John Goode has suggested) turning Morgan’s Ancient Society to a similar account: see Meier, La Pensée Utopique, pp. 308, 359-65; Goode (cited below), pp. 261–5.
54 I find especially strained Meier’s attribution of an influence from Marx’s theses on Feuerbach (p. 347); and the notion that Morris’s wholly characteristic insistence that a Communist morality must rest upon the habits induced by the general conditions of life in Communist society must depend upon knowledge of the manuscript of The German Ideology (unpublished until 1932): Meier, pp. 706–8.
55 The case being argued at this point is difficult. Meier ascribes a very general influence to ideas (as yet unpublished) in The Critique of the Gotha Programme. Possibly some of these derive from conversations with Engels, Bax, the Avelings and others, while some were of Morris’s own definition.
56 Op. cit., p. 149. See also George Levine, op. cit., on the continuity of the underlying “organic metaphor”.
57 In making these criticisms I should add that Meier treats well the questions of “barbarism” and “civilization” in Morris’s thought: see esp. his discussion of Richard Jefferies, After London, and its influence (pp. 107–13) and Part III, chapter 1. But, as Goode points out, Morgan also envisaged that “civilization” contained within itself “the elements of self-destruction”, since private property had become an “unmanageable power”; the “next higher plane of society” will be “a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes”—a view as influential upon Morris as upon Engels, who cited it at the conclusion to The Origin of the Family.
58 “The Revival of Architecture” (1888).
59 “The Revival of Handicraft” (1880).
60 See Meier (p. 646) where he refers to “un passage progressif des positions idéalistes du début au materialisme marxiste de sa maturité.”
61 Engels to Laura Lafargue, November 23rd, 1884, Correspondence, I, p. 245.
62 The Communism of William Morris (William Morris Society, 1965)-a lecture delivered in May 1959.
63 Since I did not myself take the point when I first wrote this book, it would be Pharisaical to labour it now.
64 Cf. Asa Briggs’ comment that Morris’s writings “provide the material for a critique of twentieth-century Socialism (and Communism) as much as for a critique of nineteenth-century capitalism”: William Morris: Selected Writings, p. 17.
65 M. M-H. Abensour, “Les Formes de L’Utopie Socialiste-Communiste”, these pour le Doctorat d’Etat en Science politique, Paris 1, 1973, esp. chapter 4. Forthcoming as Utopies et dialectique du socialisme. Pavot, Paris (1977?).
66 Abensour re-directs attention to Murry’s neglected articles, “The Return to Fundamentals: Marx and Morris”, Adelphi, V, nos. 1 & 2 (October-November, 1932); “Bolshevism and Bradford”, Adelphi, IV, no. 5 (August 1932).
67 See above 693. I accept Abensour’s criticism, but have let my passage stand, as a text in this argument.
68 “How Shall We Live Then?”, op. cit., p. 6.
69 “L’utopie se détache du concept pour devenir image, image médiatrice et ouverture a la vérite du désir” (p. 329).
70 “Sa fonction est de donner libre cours au désir d’interroger, de voir, de savoir, au desire même” (p. 349).
71 I write “Communist Utopian” when I refuse the term “Marxist Utopian” Gust as Abensour refuses “Scientific Utopia”) since the term “Communist” may appertain to value-systems as well as to theoretical system in a way in which “Marxist” has ceased to do. By “Communist” I mean especially those values which Morris himself attributed to the society of the future.
72 Culture and Society, 1958, pp. 155–6.
73 “Privilégiant une lecture politique, l’interprète s’expose à minimiser ou à même passer sous silence la critique de la politique dans l’oeuvre de William Morris, si fondamentale qu’elle vise une fin de la politique at que son, auteur ne peut être dit un penseur politique au sens classique du terme” (Abensour, p. 341).
74 John Goode, “William Morris and the Dream of Revolution” in John Lucas (ed.), Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century (1971).
75 Goode, pp. 222–3 and first edition of this work, 779. In this case the judgment properly criticised by Goode as “complacent” was too pious to be allowed to stand in this revision.
76 Pierson, op. cit, p. 274. This is the only place where Pierson allows the term “fusion”.
77 I strongly support Goode’s judgment here, as to the unitary theme of alienation in Morris’s work from youth to maturity. But I wish that Goode, in common with many English Marxists, would not use “ideology” in such a sloppy way. Morris did not have “a socialist ideology”.
78 I’m aware that “alienation” is used in several senses in Marxist writing. But this sense of alienated sensibility seems permissible and consonant with some passages of Marx.
79 Goode, p. 260, citing The Modern Prince, 1967, p. 69.
80 Until the mid-1880s, and occasionally thereafter (e.g. 748), Morris refers to the “new understanding of history” in terms of “evolution” of a necessary kind. It’s my impression that he came to doubt this evolutionism after 1887 (see e.g. 427-30). Engels, Bax, Aveling, Hyndman &c were all also in the habit of using evolutionary metaphors (sometimes with explicit parallels with Darwinism); and Goode notes with justice (p. 270) that some of Engels’s comments on the English scene show a “merely reflexive” defeatism fortified by determinist stamina.
81 Undoubtedly no-one can approach Sigurd after this analysis without a new kind of respect. The problem is that Goode can show this mythic elaboration only by extricating it from the poem’s “linguistic fog” and then offering it as an analytic precis; also, how much was already given to Morris in his materials?
82 1880 is the date of the first French edition of Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.
83 In the post-1929 depression Harold Laski reported that he found copies of A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere in the Tyneside area (which Morris had visited in 1887) “in house after house of the miners”, even when most of the furniture had been sold off: see Paul Thompson, William Morris, p. 219.
84 Morris to Robert Thomson, July 24th [1884], Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS. Eng. 798; Letters, p. 205.
85 “Feudal England”, Signs of Change, (1888), pp. 82–3.
86 Commonweal, Mayday issue, 1886.
87 “Communism” (1893).
88 These views are discussed lucidly by Alasdair Clayre, Work and Play (1974), esp. chapter 6.
89 Morris carefully emphasised this sequence in “How Shall We Live Then?”, op. cit., p. 10. Cf. Raymond Williams, op. cit., p. 265: “The economic reasoning, and the political promise, came to him from Marxism; the general rebellion was in older terms.”
90 “How Shall We Live Then?”, p. 20.
91 William Morris, Preface to Frank Fairman, Socialism Made Plain (1888), p. iv. Cf. another definition by negation: “the great central power of modern times, the world-market… with all the ingenious and intricate system which profit hunting commerce has built up about it” must develop into “its contradiction, which is the conscious mutual exchange of services between equals”: “How Shall We Live Then?”, p. 16.
92 Preface to Signs of Change (1888). I am here revising a very confused discussion of moral consciousness and the Marxist tradition, in my first edition, pp. 83–5 (cut from this edition), and am replacing it with points first argued in “The Communism of William Morris”, op. cit., p. 17.
93 See Morris’s criticism of some “practical” Socialists: “he is thinking entirely of the conservative side of human nature… and ignores that which exists just as surely, its revolutionary side”: Commonweal, February 18, 1888.
94 “How Shall We Live Then?”, p. 23. Another unequivocal preference which, of course, Morris never ceased to nourish as a want, was the need for artistic expression: “For without art Socialism would remain as sterile as the other forms of social organization: it would not meet the real and perpetual wants of mankind”. Preface to Ruskin’s “On the Nature of Gothic” (Kelmscott Press, 1892). And (“How I Became a Socialist”): “It is the province of art to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable life before him, a life to which the perception and creation of beauty… shall be felt to be as necessary to man as his daily bread.”
95 “How Shall We Live Then?”, pp. 23–4. The last comment was perhaps a crack at Bax’s notion that evolutionary changes “in the human organism” would eradicate “the coarser side of the sexual passion” (705), but Morris is hanging on this peg a more general irony.
96 Letters, p. 236.
97 See “Art and Socialism” (1884): “the change in store for us hidden in the breast of the Barbarism of civilization—the Proletariat”.
98 When writing in this sense, Morris offered the alternatives of Socialism or social disaster in a way which anticipates Rosa Luxembourg’s “Socialism or Barbarism”.
99 May Morris, I, p. 148.