I hope it will be understood that the following lines are in the nature of information, and nothing more. What William Morris had to say on the subject of Socialism he said himself; and it is not my business to interpose with any impertinent explanations and appreciations. Morris was a very great man; and most of the journalists who are at present summing him up for the public are doing themselves a great deal too much honour.
All I know about the beginning of Morris’s Socialism is that he once said he had been converted by John Stuart Mill’s comparison of Communism with Competitive Capitalism, in which, he said, Mill clearly gave the verdict against the evidence. I first met Morris early in the eighties in Gatti's caf6 in the Strand. In those days of bad trade, desperate poverty, and newly awakened social compunction, there seemed to us nothing for it but to break with commercialism, with its pretensions, its respectability, and its law and order, altogether, and to stand aloof from it, shame it, and support every attempt to overturn it. Mr. H. M. Hyndman was one of the party at the café, and Morris modestly confessed that he had no pretensions to be able to lead, or organise, or manage things politically, but that he was ready to do what he was told, and go where he was led. This speech struck me as being comically self-unconscious, though the rest of the party seemed to consider it a perfectly natural one ; and he acted up to it for some time, suffering himself to be led about by us as a man-of-war lets itself be hauled about by a tug. He spoke in the streets; he marched in processions; he faced agonies of nervous discomfort and apprehension in police-courts in defence of free speech. Once, during the Dod Street affair, a policeman, whose helmet strap had been broken, and whose temper was worn out, suddenly seized the nearest victim, and charged him forthwith with assault. That victim happened to be Morris, who was stung by the indignity into telling the magistrate that he was an artist and a man of letters not altogether unknown throughout Europe, a piece of self-assertion of which he was subsequently very much ashamed.
However, it had its effect. The policeman collapsed, the magistrate climbed down, and on the only subsequent occasion when he appeared in court as a prisoner for speaking in defiance of an attempt to put down open-air meetings at a "pitch" near the Edgware Road—counsel for the Crown, appalled by the eminence of his prisoner, loaded him with compliments, and appealed to him to overlook the formality of a 1s. fine. Morris spent that afternoon sitting in his garden reading one of his favourite novels by Dumas (père, of course), in order to wash off the police-court atmosphere by a bath of sunlight. He was apologetic about his extreme sensitiveness to such ordeals, and described himself to me on his return from the court as "a funkster." People who are capable of understanding Morris at all will get a better impression of the small martyrdoms his Socialism cost him from incidents like this than from silly tales about his knocking policemen down, and the like. He soon found out that the various men and societies who had "the revolution" in hand, and who were quite ready to take advantage of his docility, were, in spite of their conviction and enthusiasm, incapable humbugs in practical affairs. He tried founding a society for himself—the Socialist League—and for years patiently kept an office and edited and ran a paper, letting himself be sponged upon unmercifully by all sorts of futile people, from drunken tinkers, dramatically conscious of themselves as victims of society, to revolutionary young men sowing their political wild oats.
He persevered until 1887, when, marching in one of the processions to Trafalgar Square on the famous "Bloody Sunday," he saw the serried columns of the proletariat, thousands strong, break up and fly in a ludicrous rout before the onslaught of a couple of dozen white-faced, excited policemen. Before the start from Clerkenwell Green, he addressed the crowd, and exhorted them to march together quietly and steadily, and not let themselves be turned from their purpose. When the procession was formed, he took his place beside me for some time, and then, realising that the column had grown a great deal in front of us, went to the head, where he saw the rout at its most striking moment. There can he no doubt that the spectacle had a great effect on him. If the men who had had the presumption to call themselves his "comrades" and "brothers" had been in earnest about cleaning and beautifying human society as he was in earnest about it, he would have been justified in believing that there was a great revolutionary force beginning to move in society. Trafalgar Square cured him and many others of that illusion; and from then onward he began to extricate himself from an impossible position as best he could. He let the Socialist League drop, and turned the one faithful and respectable branch of it which had grown up round his own home during the secretaryship of his friend Mr. Emery Walker, into the Hammersmith Socialist Society.
He remained unchanged in his Socialism, but he practically adopted the views of the Fabian Society as to how the change would come about; and this, with the improvement of trade and the consequent cessation of the starvation riots of 1886 and thereabouts, relieved him of the sense of obligation to go out into the streets and take his share in propagandist work, which was now getting regularly and sensibly done by the pupils of the movement he had helped to set on foot. Thus he felt free to carry out his new project of restoring the lost art of making beautiful books, and he was far too practical and sensible a man not to see that in establishing the Kelmscott Press he did a greater service to society than by establishing the Socialist League, which at its beet was no better than a harmless club, and at its worst was not very far from being a sort of casual ward for sham conspirators.
His latest important act in the Socialist movement was to try to unite all the Socialist societies into a single party. He did not initiate the plan, but he did his best to carry it out; and he was certainly the best man for the purpose, since, as it happened, the one thing upon which the societies were agreed was a deep regard and respect for him. Mr. Hyndman, on behalf of the Social Democratic Federation, and I, on behalf of the Fabian Society, had some pleasant evening conferences at his house, where we talked about the past and the future rather than the present. I cannot answer for his view of the Social Democratic Federation on that occasion; but I know that he saw I did not believe in the proposed union; and, in fact, did not intend that it should be carried out if I could help it. There was only one man in the movement who could really take in Morris, and that was Morris himself. He was a shrewd judge of men, and those common persons who mistook the fact of his not being a common man for a want of common sense on his part, were most prodigiously mistaken.
William Morris as a Socialist
George Bernard Shaw
The Clarion, October 10th 1896
Graham Seaman, September 2020.