William Morris: The Man and The Myth. R Page Arnot 1964
How did Morris come to be a revolutionary socialist, and how did he come to join a Marxist organisation?
The usual explanation is to treat of Morris’ ‘excursion into socialism’ as some sort of aberration of the poet, one of those things which show what fantastic fellows artists are. When this usual explanation is furbished forth in its right-wing Labour variety (the Menshevik myth) it is the revolutionary character of his socialism that is regarded as the aberration. This essentially philistine view of the development of any great artist or fighter is buttressed up by sentimental reflections on struggles that Morris had to carry through inside the socialist body to which he belonged – all written in the offensive kindly manner of a doctor descanting on an imbecile patient – and on the other hand by sham versions of the history of the 1880s and the three preceding decades.
Actually the clue to the development of Morris is relatively simple and obvious. Morris left Oxford a rebel against capitalism, without, however, knowing capitalism and its meaning and its cause except as a manifestation of ugliness, anarchy and bad conditions for the mass of the people. Wholly unacquainted at that point with the life of the working class, and unaware of the existence of the Marxian socialism – this was in the later 1850s – he was nevertheless aware of the writings of Carlyle and his school, of the feudal socialists. Thomas Carlyle, in his Past and Present, as well as in his Latter-day Pamphlets and Chartism, had adopted a standpoint which could be classed as feudal socialism, and – though this twenty years afterwards rattled down to a support of slavery – Carlyle’s earlier eloquent comparison of the lot of a wage-worker amid the Chartist struggles with the lot of a serf seven hundred years before was sufficiently striking to draw commendation from Engels at the time. Morris was affected by this school, and it is to be noted that there is a certain resemblance between Morris’ treatment of the Middle Ages and what Engels discerned in the germ in Carlyle as ‘a curious apotheosis of medieval times’.
Linked, too, with feudal socialism, as is pointed out in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, was Christian Socialism, which, under Frederick Dennison Maurice, Charles Kingsley and others, was flourishing in the 1850s. John Ruskin, who was to horrify the vulgar economists by his Unto This Last, was also writing; and his books, as Morris recollected, ‘were at the time a sort of revelation to me’. The Working Men’s College in Crowndale Road, London, had taken John Ruskin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti as its art teachers. But the voice of the Chartists was muted, and it was at first to the influence of these other kinds of socialism that Morris was subjected.
In the circumstances it is not surprising that the gifted young artist, with powers yet unexplored, should from the very beginning show a fierce hatred of capitalism. At first the expression of this attitude to capitalism takes variant forms: it takes the form of delight in other periods of history that were brought to him in his childhood, first by Walter Scott, whose Waverley novels young William had read by the time he was seven, and then by all the minsters seen and the books read in his youth, culminating in The Canterbury Tales of ‘My Master, Geoffrey Chaucer’. It is shown also in his attempt to change the expression of civilisation in its arts; in his hatred of the conventions of bourgeois society, its customs, its costumes, its furniture, its decorations and patterns, its cant and hypocrisy. Not until twenty years have passed does this hatred of capitalism begin to take on a political form. But it endures all the time, increases, deepens and grows to be a fiery, unquenchable fury against capitalism, ‘a lightning flame, a shearing sword, a storm to overthrow’.
Meantime, in his poetry – The Defence of Guenevere (1858), The Life and Death of Jason (1867), The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), Love is Enough (1872) – Morris retells the stories of other times, and recreates the world that is gone. Not once does he deal with the capitalist centuries. These poems, expressing in this negative way his attitude to capitalism, are also to some extent an escape from it. Later, when he comes to grips with capitalism, the poet becomes merged in the revolutionary fighter.
Throughout all this period Morris regards with eyes of hatred the ‘art products’ of capitalism. He sees the worker made into a cog in the machine, while he does not (as some of his philistine critics seem to imagine) teach a hatred of machines. But he does intuitively grasp the fact which Marx was to express in classic form in Capital that:
Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of Capital.
How true this is can be judged from something published a hundred years after Morris’ birth in a worker’s answer to a motor manufacturer. The motor magnate, standing at the microphone dully repeating the Whig panegyrics of machinery, had said:
Mechanisation is now relieving the brain of the old tediums and giving it a new stimulus... slaves of today being made of metal, while the mind of man directs.
To this twaddle there was given a terrible answer from William Ferrie, a motor-mechanic, whose statement (duly banned by the British Broadcasting Corporation) might well be an additional footnote to Part IV of Capital:
I'd like [he said] to take you on a trip through a modern motor plant, then you'd be able to see for yourselves whether the slaves are made of metal or not... In the old days the trimming or upholstering of a car was done by a group of four trimmers. They did the complete job: ordering, measuring, cutting, matching, fitting, fixing and finishing. They were craftsmen. The finished production was the work of this small group, and I am sure there was pride in their eyes as they walked around the finished cabriolet.
Nowadays what do you see? In the trim shop of the modern factory the conveyor belt has been put in. Hundreds of men carry out small jobs – some of them taking only a few minutes. Everyone is working against the clock...
When I hear it said that man is master of the machine, and that the slaves of the day are made of metal, I can’t help smiling rather cynically. I'll tell you this: the machine enslaves us. It compels us to do its bidding. We have to accept its pace and follow its commands. The conveyor belt is our master. If the management in the factory decide to increase speed by ten per cent, a thousand hands work ten per cent faster. I am not exaggerating when I say that those of us who work on the conveyor belt are bound to it as galley slaves were bound to the galley. (5 March 1934)
Morris, with his grasp of the results of the application of machinery by the capitalist method of production, concentrated his attention first on the products of this industry and especially on the consumer-wares of the mid-nineteenth century. He looked on it all and saw that it was ugly: and he pierced through to the root cause in the division of labour and the toilsome life of the exploited worker. While he witnessed this mortal disease of the domestic arts, so that ugliness reigned along with Queen Victoria in Buckingham Palace and in Balmoral, which she and her Prince Consort had spattered indiscriminately with tartan wallpapers, as well as in the tenements and hovels of the mass of the people, he saw on the other hand that art in its process of perishing had reached the stage of becoming the preserve of a small section of the upper classes. All that art had meant in the life of mankind had become narrowed down to fine arts for fine ladies and fine gentlemen. Morris detested this anaemia of the arts, just as he detested the flat ugliness of the ordinary consumption products of capitalism. So Morris reached the two-fold conclusion: first, that art must perish unless it be a people’s art; secondly, that the worker must be an artist and the artist must be a worker. For art, he said, is the result of man’s joy in his labour. It was to the working out of the second conclusion that Morris first applied himself. Rich enough to have a house built according to his fancy and to be decorated by his pre-Raphaelite friends, he found that there was no furniture in the market that he could tolerate in his house. There were neither beds to lie in nor chairs to sit upon, neither tables, nor carpets, curtains, hangings, tableware or any other furnishing. Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road and all the other shopping centres in every town in England were one Sahara of ugliness, both costly ugliness and ugliness that was cheap and nasty.
Therefore he set himself to be the maker of goods that could be produced by worker-artists, that would serve their use, be a pleasure to the eye, a joy to the maker and the user. A firm of himself and his friends was established, and presently Morris was turning out furniture, upholstery and all kinds of decorative ware. Later it was to be carpets; the revival of the art of weaving; the revival of the use of the old vegetable dyes, which gave brighter and better colours than the aniline dye then in its crudest stage; the revival of high-warp tapestry, in which he made pictures the like of which had never been seen before; and, finally, the revival of the art of printing. Each of these was taken up, one after the other, and all of them continued to the end of his life of ceaseless activity.
All of these changes made by Morris could only be fully developed and used in a different kind of society. Morris became more and more aware of this, more and more certain that all his ordinary capacities as a craftsman must be thwarted, narrowed and confined, so long as capitalism existed; and not only his own capacities but the million-fold potentialities of all other workers; while even what little could be done by him, or by all other artists, could not be appreciated by the masses of mankind in their life of toil and penury. In The Pilgrims of Hope he asks:
The poets have sung and the builders have builded,
The painters have fashioned their tales of delight;
For what and for whom has the world’s book been gilded,
When all is for these but the blackness of night?
Thus Morris became increasingly conscious of the contradictions of capitalism, appearing to him first in their effect on the art superstructure of society. This consciousness finds expression, and extremely poignantly, in one place: in the preface to The Earthly Paradise, where he writes:
Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.
/
Folk say a wizard to a northern king
At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show,
That through one window men beheld the spring,
And through another saw the summer glow,
And through a third the fruited vines a-row,
While still, unheard, but in its wonted way,
Piped the drear wind of that December day.
/
So with this Earthly Paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me,
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be;
Whose ravening monsters mighty men shall slay,
Not the poor singer of an empty day.
The meaning is unmistakable: Morris sees the problem though he does not yet see how he can solve it. Merely this insight raises him above the ranks of contemporary artists and poets; a higher stage still is to be reached, when the gifted artist, poet and craftsman, hater of capitalism, casts by his hesitation and sets out himself to slay the ravening monsters, leaving behind him for ever ‘the poor singer of an empty day’.
The ascent into politics was preceded by the decade of the 1870s, wherein Morris found inspiration for struggle, on the one hand in the Icelandic sagas, and on the other hand in an anti-war agitation led by him. The extraordinarily potent effect upon Morris of the Icelandic Middle Ages, a society of quite a different type from European feudalism, requires more than passing mention. Here was a society with class antagonisms little developed, as is shown by the very rudimentary form of the state power, but where, on the other hand, the struggle of man with nature came to the forefront. The history of the struggles between Viking families and their descendants against this background of the struggle of man with nature, grim, harsh and terrifying, forms the content of the Icelandic sagas. Just as medieval Iceland differed in its class structure from medieval Europe, so too its literature. The difference can be most clearly brought out in the attitude to the supernatural. The supernatural exists in the Icelandic sagas, but there is no such helplessness and craven yielding as characterised much of medieval literature, product of material and spiritual exploitation of serfs. If there were no snakes in Iceland there were no monks either. The parasitic classes typical of feudal times are not to be found in the sagas. The supernatural is met with, and fought with and overcome. Grettir, in the saga, goes out and grapples to the death with the murderous ghost of Glam the Thrall.
Morris was powerfully affected by this literature, in which the quality of courage is so highly developed as to make much of contemporary medieval literature appear like bravado. He helped to translate many of the sagas and twice, in 1871 and 1873, he made what was then the unusual journey to Iceland, where he trod the wastes and deserts hallowed for him by the saga heroes. The culmination of his Icelandic studies was that he translated the Volsunga Saga (1870), the epic story that was to the other sagas (especially in its verse form in the Elder Edda) what Homer had been to the classic literature of Greece. As he himself says:
For this is the great story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks – to all our race first, and afterwards, when the change of the world has made our race nothing more than a name of what has been, a story too – then should it be to those that come after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been to us.
This story was afterwards recast by him in English verse in Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1877), the greatest epic poem of the nineteenth century. The towering courage and spirit of the epic is unmistakable, and tells us something of what its writer was becoming. [1] Iceland of the sagas had nerved Morris for the epic struggle of the classes in Britain.
The first skirmishes of Morris’ entry into public agitation were also in 1877. In March of that year he wrote to the Athenaeum in protest against the destruction of so many cathedrals and parish churches by the architect Sir Gilbert Scott and others – ‘acts of barbarism which the modern architect, parson and squire call “restoration"’ – and urged the setting up of an association for ‘protecting these relics’. The wording of this appeal (from which resulted the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings) was uncompromising: ‘I admit’, wrote the poet, ‘that the architects are, with very few exceptions, hopeless, because interest, habit and ignorance bind them, and that the clergy are hopeless, because their order, habit and an ignorance yet grosser, bind them.’
Morris was still more deeply stirred that spring of 1877 by the war-danger that had arisen and, as he told some six years later, ‘I also thoroughly dreaded the outburst of Chauvinism which swept over the country’, particularly because of its effect on ‘social questions’. He goes on: ‘I therefore took an active part in the anti-Turk agitation, was a member of the committee of the Eastern Question Association and worked I hard at it.’ How far by this time he had progressed from ‘the idle singer of an empty day’ is clear from his Unjust War, a personal manifesto, significantly addressed ‘To the working-men of England’. [2] The writer, though still a member of the Liberal Party, is already putting on his armour for the class struggle. That arming was to be completed in the ranks of a socialist organisation, in the inspiration of the example of the Communards of Paris, the first fighters for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and in the study of the teachings of Karl Marx.
Morris did not become a literary socialist or an artistic socialist, or any other kind of middle-class parody of a socialist. Morris became a revolutionary socialist. When he declared himself to be a socialist, or, as he once said, became ‘one of the Communist folk’, it was precisely in the meaning of the last words of the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels thirty-five years before:
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. In it the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!
1. Seven years later Engels, in a letter to Marx’s daughter Laura Lafargue, tells of an ‘Art Evening’ of the socialists on 21 November 1884 in Bloomsbury ('I did not go, as I do not as yet see my way to sitting three hours consecutively in a stiff chair’) and adds: ‘Bax played the piano – rather long – Morris who was here the other night and quite delighted to find the Old Norse Edda on my table – he is an Icelandic enthusiast – Morris read a piece of his poetry... (the description of Brynhild burning herself with Sigurd’s corpse), etc, etc, it went off very well – their art seems to be rather better than their literature and their poetry better than their prose.’ The first item of that evening was a pianoforte duet by Kathleen Ina and G Bernard Shaw.
2. Reproduced at the end of this chapter.