William Morris: The Man and The Myth. R Page Arnot 1964
William Morris, artist, craftsman and poet, was born on 24 March 1834 at Walthamstow in Essex, ‘a suburban village on the edge of Epping Forest’. He was thus a Londoner like Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton, even a suburbanite like John Keats. Morris came of a well-to-do bourgeois family, [1] and went through the routine of his class at public school and Oxford University. He wrote poems, was apprenticed to an architect, became a master craftsman in one field after another, from furniture designing to printing; became a manufacturer; took an active part in an anti-war association in the 1870s; joined in 1883 a socialist organisation, agitated and organised; edited The Commonweal, to which Frederick Engels and Eleanor Marx contributed; and, after a life of intense and ceaseless activity over many fields, died at the age of sixty-two having remained to the end a revolutionary socialist.
William Morris, pretty well known in Europe in his lifetime, is still a name in the British labour movement, while his fame has spread far beyond the English-speaking countries. His chants for socialists are heard at May Day demonstrations. His memory was revered by those who could recall him, especially his plain, simple habit of speech, essence of straightforwardness and revolutionary vigour. His writings on art and socialism still have an influence, and would have more but for the veil that has been cast around him. For, more than any other socialist leader of the nineteenth century, Morris has been subjected to that ‘canonisation’ of which Lenin set forth the stigmata:
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes have invariably meted out to them relentless persecution and received their teaching with the most savage hostility, most furious hatred and a ruthless campaign of slanders. After their death, however, attempts are usually made to turn them into harmless saints, canonising them, as it were, and investing their name with a certain halo, by way of ‘consolation’ to the oppressed classes, and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating and vulgarising the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge.
This halo-casting process set in early with William Morris, grew with each year after his death, until it reached a climax in the hundredth year after his birth. Then, in March 1934, these words of Lenin were proven to apply faithfully. For this Englishman’s centenary celebrations were turned into an orgy of ‘canonisation'; books poured forth ‘in his honour'; newspaper articles were written in dozens; and this ‘great Victorian’ (did they ever read what Morris wrote of Queen Victoria?) was hoisted up to his niche as a ‘harmless saint’. Thereafter this false effigy was set up as an object of worship.
Consequently this graven image of Morris has to be shattered before any estimate of him is possible. The myths built up about him have to be destroyed. There are at least two kinds of myth about William Morris. One, clearly ‘establishmentarian’, is indeed the bourgeois myth: the other I may call the Menshevik myth, not simply as a handy alliterative code-name for it but chiefly because it is lodged amongst European parties still belonging to that category of sixty years ago and still seeing history only from behind.
Thirty years ago the bourgeois myth, germinating from the first hints in Mackail’s biography of 1899, was proclaimed to the world by a notable figure of the establishment. Stanley Baldwin, the iron-master who led the Conservative Party for fifteen years (and was thrice Prime Minister) till the 1937 Coronation finished his task, was chosen to open the great 1934 centenary exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. In Baldwin’s speech, and in newspaper comments upon it, there was no mention whatever of Morris as a revolutionary. He is a great poet, a great craftsman, a great artist, a great influence, a great what-not; but he is not mentioned as a revolutionary. Prime Ministers were not always as impudent as this. They gave the subject a wide berth. Some years earlier, when a predecessor of Baldwin as Prime Minister, the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, delivered his Romanes Lectures at Oxford on the ‘Great Victorians’ he significantly omitted William Morris from the list. But by the 1930s the Tory leader of the House of Commons – representative of the capitalist class, of ‘these foul swine’ as they are called in A Dream of John Ball – had the impudence to scatter his mendacities over the memory of the man who said of the Parliament of his day that it was:
... on the one side a kind of watch committee, sitting to see that the interests of the upper classes took no hurt; and on the other hand a sort of blind to delude people into supposing that they had some share in the management of their own affairs.
Of course Morris was a great artist and a great craftsman, but neither his art nor his craftsman’s work can be truly understood, nor can the whole man be understood, unless he is seen as he really was, as a revolutionary socialist, fighting for the overthrow of capitalism and for the victory of the working class.
The Menshevik myth, widely diffused in Britain and still more widely abroad, has always been of a different character. The picture is of Morris as ‘a gentle socialist’ and fits in well with what Ramsay MacDonald, for many years leader of the British Labour Party before he ended as Prime Minister of a coalition (but predominantly Tory) government, once said of socialism – his socialism – that it was based not upon economics but had an historical, ethical ‘and literary’ basis. William Morris was hardly dead before this myth began to be built up by Bruce Glasier and many others. The hash of ‘Appreciations’ written for the Walthamstow Centenary Celebrations in several cases carried the myth into wildest travesty. [2] The burden of this Menshevik myth, as it has lingered on for over sixty years, is that Morris was ‘not a Marxist’, and if there is now some assimilation of Morris and Marx in their scribblings it is only because they have at length created a mythical Marx to fit in with their mythical Morris. It does not matter to myth-mongers that Morris’ first political utterances display his consciousness of class antagonism and class hatred; that these writings, beginning with the influence of John Ruskin, became more and more filled with the influence of Marx; that he joined a Marxist body; that, like Marx and Engels, he distrusted and broke with the founder of that first organisation; that, along with Marx’s daughter Eleanor, and other close associates, he founded and led a second Marxist organisation; that, on its behalf, he sponsored an international socialist congress in Paris in 1889; and that in his whole writings during the period of his political activity Morris is accepting and following as best he can the teachings of Marx on political economy, the antagonism of classes in history and the strategy of the long struggle that would lead to a social revolution.
It should be realised that there is no question at all of these people weighing up the mistakes of Morris, as Frederick Engels did, estimating his serious errors in tactics. No. They simply brush aside the Morris that was, and construct a Morris that never existed, a sort of sickly dilettante socialist, as personally incredible as he would be politically monstrous.
What was the cause of this myth-building? The early myth-mongers, all of them bitterly anti-Marxist, found it intolerable that an artist whom some of them regarded as a new Michelangelo or a new Leonardo da Vinci should be counted a follower of Marx. So that in essence the fight over the body of Morris was a fight against the influence of Marx inside the labour movement; and unfortunately the only socialist body based on the class struggle was dominated by leaders whose factional antagonism to Morris made them willing to leave his reputation in the hands of the traducers without a protest.
The result was that in the first decades of this century old associates of William Morris could be found who would calmly state that he had not even studied Marx. What evidence was brought forward for this? Can it be believed that the only substantial evidence is a statement in his article for Justice of 16 June 1894, in the series ‘How I Became a Socialist'?
Whereas I thoroughly enjoyed the historical part of Capital, I suffered agonies of confusion of the brain over reading the pure economics of that great work.
Everyone knows that the first chapters of Capital are difficult: as much is stated by Marx himself as well as by Engels (and also by Lenin), and the only meaning of this sentence is that Morris was honest enough to confess his difficulties. Yet, actually, the meaning of this sentence was somehow twisted to make the proof that Morris was an anti-Marxist. Starting from the axiom ‘Morris not a Marxist’, they then proceed on the evidence of ill-remembered gossip to rule out all in his writings that is evidence to the contrary.
It will be necessary in the course of this book to deal with various examples of this distortion of Morris’ actual words. Meantime, a few brief references will serve to smash their axiom, ‘Morris not a Marxist’.
First, in A Summary of the Principles of Socialism, written by HM Hyndman and William Morris and published in 1883 by the newly-founded Democratic Federation, the standpoint taken, whatever its imperfections, is most distinctly intended to be Marxist.
Secondly, in the short and telling Manifesto of the Socialist League (December 1884), written solely by Morris, the thought, expressed with great simplicity, is even more explicitly Marxist.
Thirdly, in the papers of JL Mahon, first Secretary of the Socialist League, there is a single handwritten sheet, ascribed to Morris in the following words: ‘MSS by W Morris. Found in his copy of Capital which he gave me about 1888-1890. (Signed) JL Mahon, 8 February 1924.’ It is a summary of one of the portions of ‘pure economics’ and is to be found in the twenty-fifth chapter of ‘this great work’.
Lastly, in The Commonweal series, called ‘Socialism From the Root Up’ [3] (1886-87), jointly written by William Morris and Belfort Bax, an attempt is made to trace the development of society from earliest times in the light of historical materialism. Chapters of particular interest are those in which Utopian Socialism is analysed and condemned (and yet in the Morris-myth Morris is referred to as a Utopian Socialist!) and that other entitled ‘Scientific Socialism: Karl Marx’, in which the argument of Capital is summarised and defended. This last book proved a snag for the myth-mongers; amongst them Bruce Glasier (editor for many years of The Labour Leader) who wrote memoirs on Morris published in 1921. Glasier, who was busy remaking Morris in his own image (see the ridiculous chapter ‘Morris and Religion’, where Glasier, himself deep in the swamp of religiosity, flounders pitifully around Morris’ explicit statement: ‘I am what is called bluntly an atheist’), had the effrontery to suggest that Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome represented the views of Bax but not those of Morris, who ‘belonged to the old Utopian school rather than to the modern Scientific Socialist school of thought’. The answer to this slander by Glasier had already been given by Morris and Bax in their preface, in which they wrote:
We have only further to add that the work has been in the true sense of the word a collaboration, each sentence having been carefully considered by both the authors in common, although now one, now the other, has had more to do with the initial suggestions in different portions of the work.
But it was clearly necessary for the myth-mongers that the chapters of that book, with their fully Marxist outlook, had to be discounted at all costs.
1. In his fiftieth year William Morris wrote in reply to an inquiry: ‘We lived in the ordinary bourgeois style of comfort; and since we belonged to the evangelical section of the English Church I was brought up in what I should call rich establishmentarian puritanism; a religion which even as a boy I never took to.’
2. ‘He was a great Distributist’, wrote GK Chesterton.
3. Afterwards republished in book form under the title of Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (1893).