ARTS AND CRAFTS
Capitalist industrialism may be indicted on economic grounds because it
is wasteful, and on moral grounds because it is dishonest; also it may
be indicted upon esthetic grounds because it is ugly. The artistic
temperament objects to it for this last reason, and there were some
among the artists who set out to make war upon it.
John Ruskin was the son of a wealthy English wine merchant; he devoted
himself to the study of art, and sought to carry it back to the simple
standards of the Christian primitives. He became a lecturer and teacher,
and founded a college for the sons of workingmen at Oxford. We find him
leading groups of British university students out to do manual labor
upon the roads--a pathetic effort to be useful and honest in a world of
cheating and exploiting. In the end Ruskin went out of his mind, as a
result of brooding over the ugliness and cruelty of his country’s
industrial system.
Among his disciples was one who is entitled to a place in these pages,
because he was a working artist who strove to create beauty upon a sound
social basis; also because he was a Socialist who tried to teach the
principles of brotherhood and solidarity to a world of individualist and
capitalist art.
William Morris was born in 1834; his parents were wealthy and he
inherited a comfortable income. His mother designed him for a bishop,
but he soon outgrew that career. He parted with his Christian faith on
the intellectual side, but he still kept its emotions; he was a
passionate lover of the Middle Ages, and of the Gothic spirit in art. He
managed to persuade himself that the Middle Ages had been happy, and
that the craftsmen in those days had been free to make what they loved
without reference to the profit motive. So all his life he yearned back
to those good old days, and made them a standard by which to judge
everything bad in his own time.
He was a simple, whole-souled fellow, who loved to do things with his
hands, and possessed extraordinary aptitude for all the arts; he learned
to paint and to carve and to decorate, and to do every kind of hand
labor that contained any slightest element of artistry. He looked out
upon modern industrialism and saw wholesale, cheap production of ugly
and commonplace and unsubstantial goods. He hated it with his whole
soul, and attributed all the moral evils of the time to the fact that
the workers had lost their love for their job and their pride in
craftsmanship. He wanted a home to live in, and because no architect
knew how to design a beautiful home, Morris became his own architect;
because he could not buy any beautiful furniture, he designed his own
furniture and had a carpenter make it. Out of this came the
establishment of a firm to do such labor, and so grew the Arts and
Crafts movement.
That brought Morris into touch with workingmen, a very dangerous thing;
because under our present social system it is better for a gentleman to
stay in his own class, and not find out what is happening to the
workers. Morris was drawn into politics--beginning, curiously enough,
with an effort to save old churches and other buildings from being
“restored” according to modern taste. Before long we find him evolved
into one of the leading Victorian rebels, a founder of the
Social-Democratic Federation, speaking afternoons and evenings at
soap-box meetings. The critics lamented this, just as they lamented the
political career of John Milton: it seemed such a waste of time for a
great poet and artist. But it was all a part of William Morris’s life;
if he had not been the kind of man he was, he could not have produced
the kind of art he did.
In between all his other labors he wrote poetry; it flowed out of him
freely, wonder tales of all sorts, having to do with those old times
which he loved, and the beautiful things which he imagined happening
there. It is very good narrative verse, and all young people ought to
read “The Earthly Paradise”; also they ought to read “The Dream of John
Ball,” and learn what happened to the social rebels in the old days.
Morris’s most popular piece of prose writing is “News from Nowhere.” He
had read Bellamy’s Utopia, “Looking Backward,” and he did not like it,
because Bellamy was an American, and had organized and systematized the
world. Nobody was going to organize and systematize William Morris; he
set about to make his own Utopia, in which everything is placid and
commonplace, healthy as the animals are healthy--but also abominably
dull.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “You are discussing one of the classics of your movement,
and you know what the critics all say: the Socialists ought to begin by
agreeing on what they want.”
“I know,” says Ogi, “and I’m sorry to disappoint them. But there are
many different kinds of people in the world, and some of each kind in
our movement. I am a Socialist who believes in machinery, and has no
interest in any world that does not develop machine power to the
greatest possible extent. We are like people traveling through a tunnel;
it is dark and smoky, and some want to turn back, but I want to go
through to the other end.”
“Morris and Ruskin said the other end was in hell.”
“Yes, but I think their eyes were blinded by the smoke. What is wrong is
not with machinery, but with the private ownership of machinery. There
is no reason why machines should not make beautiful and substantial
things, instead of making ugly and dishonest things--except the fact
that machines are owned by people who have no interest except to make a
profit out of the product. A thing is not less beautiful because there
are millions of other things exactly like it in the world. That is just
a snobbish notion, and Morris should have learned the lesson from any
field of daisies.”
Here is Sherwood Anderson telling the story of his life. He is one
American who does not like machinery, and he has good reason; he has
worked in factories, and he knows. He agrees with Morris that the
monotony of the machine destroys the initiative and therefore the morals
of the workers; they cannot create, and so they tell smutty stories. But
you note that Anderson is not a Socialist, and has not the vision of
what a factory might be if it were democratically owned and managed by
the workers. The workers will then be very proud of their beautiful
machines, they will learn to understand and tend them all, and
administer the politics of the great industry of which the machines are
a part. The individual worker will travel from the factories to the
harvest fields and back, as many varieties of labor as he fancies. And
anyhow he won’t have to work but three or four hours a day, and the rest
of the time he can develop his faculties by making verses, or playing
music, or staging dramas, or baseball games, or whatever he pleases. And
every year the machines will become more automatic, until some day the
only labor of man will consist of pressing a few buttons every morning.
Whether you like that or not depends entirely upon whether or not you
have developed your brains, and want to develop them still further.