PUBLIC LIFE AND SOCIALISM.
In the autumn of 1876, just after the publication of _Sigurd the Volsung_,
Morris took his first dip in the ocean of public affairs, the waves of
which were presently almost to submerge him. He was forty-two years of
age, and had thus far managed to keep well within the range of his
individual interests and away from the political and social questions that
none the less stirred in his mind from time to time, and pricked him to
random assertions that he would have nothing to do with them, that his
business was with dreams, and that he would remain "the idle singer of an
empty day." He was roused to action, however, by the barbarous massacre on
the part of the Mussulman soldiery of men, women, and children in
Bulgaria, the news of which moved the heart of England to a frenzy of
indignation. When Russia intervened, the possibility that England might
take up arms on the side of Turkey in order to erect a barrier against
Russian aggression was intolerable to him, and he wrote to the _Daily
News_ in eloquent protestation. "I who am writing this," he said, with a
just appreciation of his ordinary attitude toward political matters, "am
one of a large class of men--quiet men, who usually go about their own
business, heeding public matters less than they ought, and afraid to speak
in such a huge concourse as the English nation, however much they may
feel, but who are now stung into bitterness by thinking how helpless they
are in a public matter that touches them so closely." "I appeal," he
continued, "to the workingmen, and pray them to look to it that if this
shame falls upon them they will certainly remember it and be burdened by
it when their day clears for them and they attain all and more than all
they are now striving for." Again in the spring of 1877, when war seemed
imminent, Morris appealed "to the workingmen of England," issuing a
manifesto which was practically his first Socialist document and heralded
the long series of lectures and addresses, poems, articles, and treatises,
presently to take the place of romances and epics in his literary life.
After declaring that the people who were bringing on the war were "greedy
gamblers on the Stock Exchange, idle officers of the army and navy (poor
fellows!), worn-out mockers of the clubs, desperate purveyors of exciting
war-news for the comfortable breakfast-tables of those who have nothing to
lose by war, and lastly, in the place of honour, the Tory Rump, that we
fools, weary of peace, reason, and justice, chose at the last election to
represent us," he added a passage that reads like the outcome of many a
heated discussion with brethren of his own social class.
"Workingmen of England, one word of warning yet," he said: "I doubt if you
know the bitterness of hatred against freedom and progress that lies at
the hearts of a certain part of the richer classes in this country; their
newspapers veil it in a kind of decent language, but do but hear them
talking amongst themselves, as I have often, and I know not whether scorn
or anger would prevail in you at their folly and insolence. These men
cannot speak of your order, of its aims, of its leaders, without a sneer
or an insult; these men, if they had the power (may England perish
rather!) would thwart your just aspirations, would silence you, would
deliver you bound hand and foot forever to irresponsible capital.
Fellow-citizens, look to it, and if you have any wrongs to be redressed,
if you cherish your most worthy hope of raising your whole order
peacefully and solidly, if you thirst for leisure and knowledge, if you
long to lessen these inequalities which have been our stumbling-block
since the beginning of the world, then cast aside sloth and cry out
against an Unjust War, and urge us of the middle classes to do no less."
[Illustration: _Picture by Rossetti in which the Children's Faces are
Portraits of May Morris_]
By this time he was treasurer of the Eastern Question Association, and
working with all his might against the principles of the war party in
England, contributing to the general agitation the political ballad called
_Wake, London Lads!_ which was sung with much enthusiasm at one of the
meetings to the appropriate air, _The Hardy Norseman's Home of Yore_, and
was afterwards freely distributed in the form of a leaflet among the
mechanics of London. It was during this period of political activity that
J. R. Green wrote of him to E. A. Freeman: "I rejoiced to see the poet
Morris--whom Oliphant setteth even above you for his un-Latinisms--brought
to grief by being prayed to draw up a circular on certain Eastern matters,
and gravelled to find 'English words.' I insidiously persuaded him that
the literary committee had fixed on him to write one of a series of
pamphlets which Gladstone wants brought out for the public enlightenment,
and that the subject assigned him was 'The Results of the Incidence of
Direct Taxation on the Christian Rayah,' but that he was forbidden to
speak of the 'onfall of straight geld,' or other such 'English' forms. I
left him musing and miserable." Musing and miserable he may well have been
at finding that his duty, as he conceived it, was leading him into such
unlovely paths, but the English of his polemical writings was unmistakable
enough and unconfused by any affectations, Saxon or Latin. In declining to
stand for the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford on the occasion of Matthew
Arnold's withdrawal from it, he had confessed to a peculiar inaptitude for
expressing himself except in the one way in which his gift lay, and it was
true that his mind was singularly inept outside its natural course. He had
not a reasoning mind. His opinions, dictated as they were chiefly by
sentiment, were not worked out by the careful processes dear to genuine
thinkers. But he was before all things a believer. No man was ever more
certain of the absolute rectitude of his views, and by this sincerity of
conviction they were driven home to his public. He was so eager to make
others feel as he felt that he spent his utmost skill upon the delivery of
his message, using the simple and downright phrases that could be
understood by the least cultivated of his hearers. It was impossible to
listen to him, says one of his friends, not a convert to his views,
without for the time at least agreeing with him. Thus he conquered the
"peculiar inaptitude" of which he speaks by the force of his great
integrity, and although he complained that "the cursed words" went to
water between his fingers, they accomplished their object.
"When the crisis in the East was past," says Mr. Mackail, "it left Morris
thoroughly in touch with the Radical leaders of the working class in
London, and well acquainted with the social and economic ideas which,
under the influence of widening education and of the international
movement among the working classes, were beginning to transform their
political creed from an individualist Radicalism into a more or less
definite doctrine of State Socialism." This contact was sufficient to
kindle into activity the ideas implanted in his own mind during his
college days. Carlyle had then thundered forth his amazing anathemas
against modern civilisation and had declaimed that Gurth born thrall of
Cedric, with a brass collar round his neck, was happy in comparison with
the poor of to-day enjoying their "liberty to die by starvation," no
displeasing gospel to a young mediaevalist; while Ruskin had preached with
vociferous eloquence the doctrine that happiness in labour is the end and
aim of life. From the beginning of his work in decorative art Morris had
shown the influence of these beliefs in peace. He was now to let them lead
him into war.
Before he wrote himself down a Socialist, however, he set on foot a
movement not so important in the eyes of the public, but much more
characteristic of his personal mission in the world of life and art. He
had long before learned from Ruskin that the so-called restoration of
public monuments meant "the most total destruction which a building can
suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered: a
destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed."
Whatever his feeling may have been concerning the destructive restoration,
of which he must have seen manifold examples before this period of his
middle age, he seems to have awakened rather suddenly to the necessity of
taking some active measure to check the ravages of the restorer. Goaded,
finally, by the sight of alterations going on in one of the beautiful
parish churches near Kelmscott, he conceived the idea of forming a society
of protest. Early in 1877 the impending fate of the Abbey Church at
Tewkesbury, under the devastating hands of Sir Gilbert Scott, prompted him
to put the idea at once before the public, and he wrote to the _Athenaeum_
a letter in which he went straight to the heart of his subject with
clearness and simplicity.
"My eye just now caught the word 'restoration' in the morning paper," he
wrote, "and on looking closer, I saw that this time it is nothing less
than the Minster of Tewkesbury that is to be destroyed by Sir Gilbert
Scott. Is it altogether too late to do something to save it,--it and
whatever else of beautiful and historical is still left us on the sites of
the ancient buildings we were once so famous for? Would it not be of some
use once for all, and with the least delay possible, to set on foot an
association for the purpose of watching over and protecting these relics
which, scanty as they are now become, are still wonderful treasures, all
the more priceless in this age of the world, when the newly-invented study
of living history is the chief joy of so many of our lives?
"Your paper has so steadily and courageously opposed itself to these acts
of barbarism which the modern architect, parson, and squire call
'restoration,' that it would be waste of words here to enlarge on the ruin
that has been wrought by their hands; but, for the saving of what is left,
I think I may write you a word of encouragement, and say that you by no
means stand alone in the matter, and that there are many thoughtful
people who would be glad to sacrifice time, money, and comfort in defence
of those ancient monuments; besides, though I admit that the architects
are, with very few exceptions, hopeless, because interest, habit, and an
ignorance yet grosser, bind them; still there must be many people whose
ignorance is accidental rather than inveterate, whose good sense could
surely be touched if it were clearly put to them that they were destroying
what they, or more surely still, their sons and sons' sons would one day
fervently long for, and which no wealth or energy could ever buy again for
them.
"What I wish for, therefore, is that an association should be set on foot
to keep a watch on old monuments, to protest against all 'restoration'
that means more than keeping out wind and weather, and, by all means,
literary and other, to awaken a feeling that our ancient buildings are not
mere ecclesiastical toys, but sacred monuments of the nation's growth and
hope."
In less than a month the association was formed under the title of the
"Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings," abbreviated by Morris to
the "Anti-Scrape Society," in cheerful reference to the pernicious
scraping and pointing indulged in by the restorers. Morris was made
secretary of the Society, and, as long as he lived, worked loyally in its
behalf, giving, in addition to time and money, the labour, which to him
was grievous, of lecturing for it. He wrote a prospectus that was
translated into French, German, Italian, and Dutch, and among the more
important of his protests were those against the demolition of some of the
most beautiful portions of St. Mark's at Venice, and the "bedizening" of
the interior of Westminster Abbey.
For the sentiment which inspired him, the inextinguishable love in his
heart toward every example however humble of the art he reverenced, we may
turn to one of the most eloquently reasonable passages of his numerous
lectures. Closing his account of pattern designing with a reference to the
creation of modern or Gothic art, he says: "Never until the time of that
death or cataleptic sleep of the so-called Renaissance did it forget its
origin, or fail altogether in fulfilling its mission of turning the
ancient curse of labour into something more like a blessing."
"As to the way in which it did its work," he continues, "as I have no
time, so also I have but little need to speak, since there is none of us
but has seen and felt some portion of the glory which it left behind, but
has shared some portion of that most kind gift it gave the world; for even
in this our turbulent island, the home of rough and homely men, so far
away from the centres of art and thought which I have been speaking of,
did simple folk labour for those that shall come after them. Here in the
land we yet love they built their homes and temples; if not so
majestically as many peoples have done, yet in such sweet accord with the
familiar nature amidst which they dwelt, that when by some happy chance
we come across the work they wrought, untouched by any but natural change,
it fills us with a satisfying untroubled happiness that few things else
could bring us. Must our necessities destroy, must our restless ambition
mar, the sources of this innocent pleasure, which rich and poor may share
alike--this communion with the very hearts of the departed men? Must we
sweep away these touching memories of our stout forefathers and their
troublous days that won our present peace and liberties?
"If our necessities compel us to it, I say we are an unhappy people; if
our vanity lure us into it, I say we are a foolish and light-minded
people, who have not the wits to take a little trouble to avoid spoiling
our own goods. Our own goods? Yes, the goods of the people of England, now
and in time to come: we who are now alive are but life-renters of them.
Any of us who pretend to any culture know well that in destroying or
injuring one of these buildings we are destroying the pleasure, the
culture--in a word, the humanity--of unborn generations. It is speaking
very mildly to say that we have no right to do this for our temporary
convenience. It is speaking too mildly. I say any such destruction is an
act of brutal dishonesty.... It is in the interest of living art and
living history that I oppose 'restoration.' What history can there be in a
building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at best be anything but a
hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigour of the earlier
world? As to the art that is concerned in it, a strange folly it seems to
me for us who live among these bricken masses of hideousness, to waste the
energies of our short lives in feebly trying to add new beauty to what is
already beautiful. Is that all the surgery we have for the curing of
England's spreading sore? Don't let us vex ourselves to cure the
antepenultimate blunders of the world, but fall to on our own blunders.
Let us leave the dead alone, and, ourselves living, build for the living
and those that shall live. Meantime, my plea for our Society is this, that
since it is disputed whether restoration be good or not, and since we are
confessedly living in a time when architecture has come on the one hand to
Jerry building, and on the other to experimental designing (good, very
good experiments some of them), let us take breath and wait; let us
sedulously repair our ancient buildings, and watch every stone of them as
if they were built of jewels (as indeed they are), but otherwise let the
dispute rest till we have once more learned architecture, till we once
more have among us a reasonable, noble, and universally used style. Then
let the dispute be settled. I am not afraid of the issue. If that day ever
comes, we shall know what beauty, romance, and history mean, and the
technical meaning of the word 'restoration' will be forgotten.
"Is not this a reasonable plea? It means prudence. If the buildings are
not worth anything they are not worth restoring; if they are worth
anything they are at least worth treating with common sense and prudence.
"Come now, I invite you to support the most prudent Society in all
England."
It is easy to understand from such examples as this how Morris gained his
popularity as a lecturer. In the printed sentences you read the eager,
persuasive accent, so convincing because so convinced. On the platform he
stood, say his friends, like a conqueror, stalwart and sturdy, his good
grey eyes flashing or twinkling, his voice deepening with feeling, his
gesture and speech sudden and spontaneous, his aspect that of an
insurgent, a fighter against custom and orthodoxy.
It was not long after the formation of the Society for the Protection of
Ancient Buildings that he began to show himself a rebel in more than words
against existing social laws. The steps by which he reached his membership
in the Democratic Federation in the year 1883 are not very easily traced.
Comments on the distressing gulf between rich and poor and on the
conditions under which the modern workingman did his task became more
frequent in his letters and addresses. His mind seemed to be gradually
adjusting itself to the thought that the only hope for obtaining ideal
conditions in which--this was always the ultimate goal--art might be
constantly associated with handicraft, was perhaps to let art go for the
time being, and upset society and all its conventions in preparation for a
new earth. "Art must go under," he wrote in one of his private letters
"where or however it may come up again." But it was always the fate of art
that concerned him. He never really understood what Socialism technically
and economically speaking meant. He read its books with labour and sorrow,
and struggled with its theories in support of his antagonism to the
commercial methods of modern business, but he gained no firm grasp of any
underlying political principle. In most of his later addresses he talked
pure sentiment concerning social questions, characteristically declaring
it to be the purest reason. His avowed belief was that "workmen should be
artists and artists workmen," and this, he felt, could only be attained
under the freest conditions. A workman should not be clothed in shabby
garments, should not be wretchedly housed, overworked, or underfed. But
neither will it profit him much if he wear good clothes, and keep short
hours, and eat wholesome food, and contribute to the ugliness of the wares
turned out by commerce. The idea that a man works only to earn leisure in
which he does no work was shocking to him as it had been to Ruskin.
Pleasant work to do, leisure for other work of a different pleasantness,
this was what the workingman really wanted if only he knew it. It was
clear to Morris that he himself worked "not the least in the world for the
sake of earning leisure by it," but "partly driven by the fear of
starvation and disgrace," and partly because he loved the work itself;
and while he was ready to confess that he spent a part of his leisure "as
a dog does" in contemplation, and liked it well enough, he also spent part
of it in work which gave him as much pleasure as his bread-earning work,
neither more nor less. Obviously if there are men with whom such is not
the case it is because they have not the right kind of work to do, and are
not doing it in the right way, and it is equally obvious that the wrong
work and the wrong way of doing it are forced upon them. Left to
themselves they are bound to do what pleases them and what will please
others of right minds. The ideal handicraftsman developing under an ideal
social order "shall put his own individual intelligence and enthusiasm
into the goods he fashions. So far from his labour being 'divided,' which
is the technical phrase for his always doing one minute piece of work and
never being allowed to think of any other, so far from that, he must know
all about the ware he is making and its relation to similar wares; he must
have a natural aptitude for his work so strong that no education can force
him away from his special bent. He must be allowed to think of what he is
doing and to vary his work as the circumstances of it vary, and his own
moods. He must be forever stirring to make the piece he is at work at
better than the last. He must refuse at anybody's bidding to turn out, I
won't say a bad, but even an indifferent piece of work, whatever the
public want or think they want. He must have a voice, and a voice worth
listening to in the whole affair."
This attitude is almost identical with that of Ruskin. To see how the
theories of master and pupil coincide one has only to read _The Stones of
Venice_ and compare with the passage quoted above the famous chapter on
_The Nature of the Gothic_.
"It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine," says
Ruskin, "which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass
of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling
for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their
universal outcry against wealth and against nobility is not forced from
them either by the pressure of famine or the sting of mortified pride.
These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of
society were never yet shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men
are ill-fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make
their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure.
It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they
cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which
they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than
men.... We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great
civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false
name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the
men--divided into mere segments of men--broken into small fragments and
crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left
in a man is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in
making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail.... And the great cry
that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace
blast, is all in very deed for this,--that we manufacture everything there
except men.... And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads
can be met only ... by a right understanding on the part of all classes,
of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them and making them
happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or
cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman." But
Ruskin was altogether too much of an aristocrat, too much of an egoist, to
root out classes. We can hardly imagine him preaching as Morris finally
came to preach a revolution which should make it impossible for him to
condescend. He could devote seven thousand pounds of his own money to
establishing a St. George Society, but it would probably never have
occurred to him to head a riot in Trafalgar Square.
When Morris, under the influence of old theories and new associations,
came to consider not only the desirability but the possibility of
establishing a social order in which men could work quite happily and art
could get loose from handcuffs welded and locked by commercialism, it was
a necessity of his temperament that he should turn his back on halfway
methods and urge drastic reforms. His way was not the way of compromise,
and he seriously believed that if "civilisation" could be swept out of the
path by a revolution which should destroy all class distinctions and all
machinery and machine-made goods, which should do away with commercialism
and strip the world to its bare bones, so that men could start afresh, all
equal and all freed from the superfluities of life, there would grow up a
charming communism in which kind hearts would take the place of coronets,
and cheerful labour the place of hopeless toil. We find him writing in a
private letter--madly, yet with the downright force that kindled where it
struck--that he has "faith more than a grain of mustard seed in the future
history of civilisation," that he now knows it to be doomed to
destruction, and that it is a consolation and joy to him to think of
barbarism once more flooding the world, "and real feelings and passions,
however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies." It was
thus he thought, or felt, about the new field of labour upon which he was
entering, and it is from this point of view that he must be defended
against the slurs that have been cast at him as a "Capitalist-Socialist."
He did not ignore the ideal of renunciation which had tempted him in his
youth, and which he again thought of in his middle age--though less
tempted, perhaps. But he reasoned, logically enough, that for one man or a
few men to divide his or their wealth with the poor would not advance
the world by a furlong or a foot toward the state of things which he had
at heart to bring about. It might raise the beneficiaries a little higher
in the ranks--in other words, bring them a little closer to the dangerous
middle-class, from which came the worst of their troubles, and it might
also have the effect of making them a trifle more content with existing
conditions. Neither effect was desirable in his eyes. A divine discontent
to be spread throughout all classes was the end and aim of such Socialism
as he accepted. Nothing could be done except through the antagonism of
classes, which seemed in itself to provide a remedy. In _News from
Nowhere_, his best known Socialistic romance, the name of which was
perhaps suggested by Kingsley's Utopian and anagrammatic _Erewhon_, he
puts into the mouth of an old man who is himself a survival from the days
of "class slavery," a description of the imaginary change to an ideal
Communism. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, it is assumed, a
federation of labour made it possible for the workmen or "slaves" to
establish from time to time important strikes that would sometimes stop an
industry altogether for a while, and to impose upon their "masters" other
restrictions that seriously interfered with the systematic conduct of
commerce. The resulting "bad times" reached a crisis in the year 1952,
when the "Combined Workers" determined upon the bold step of demanding a
practical reversal of classes, by which they should have the management
of the whole natural resources of the country, together with the machinery
for using them. The upper classes resisting, riots ensued, then the "Great
Strike." "The railways did not run," the old man recalls; "the telegraph
wires were unserved; flesh, fish, and green stuff brought to market was
allowed to lie there still packed and perishing; the thousands of
middle-class families, who were utterly dependent for the next meal on the
workers, made frantic efforts through their more energetic members to
cater for the needs of the day, and amongst those of them who could not
throw off the fear of what was to follow, there was, I am told, a certain
enjoyment of this unexpected picnic--a forecast of the days to come in
which all labour grew pleasant." Out of all this came civil war, with
destruction of wares and machinery and also the destruction of the spirit
of commercialism. With the removal of the spur of competition it is
admitted that there was a temporary danger of making men dull by giving
them too much time for thought or idle musing. How was this danger
overcome? By a growing interest in art, to be sure. The people, all
workmen now, and providing very simply for their simple needs, "no longer
driven desperately to painful and terrible overwork," began to wish to
make the work they had in hand as attractive as possible, and rudely and
awkwardly to ornament the wares they produced. "Thus at last and by slow
degrees," the old man concludes, "we got pleasure into our work; then we
became conscious of that pleasure, and cultivated it, and took care that
we had our fill of it, and then all was gained and we were happy."
[Illustration: HONEYSUCKLE DESIGN FOR LINEN]
There is little here to charm the logically constructive mind, acquainted
with human nature, and in the lectures setting forth in more detail and
with more attempt at practical teaching the methods by which society could
be enlightened and raised to his standard of excellence, Morris boldly
invites the scorn of the political economist by the wholly visionary
character of his pathetically "reasonable" views. Nevertheless, he was not
without an instinct for distinguishing social evils and suggesting right
remedies. Strip his doctrines of their exaggerated conclusions from false
premises, and it is possible to find in them the seeds of many reforms
that have come about to the inestimable benefit of the modern world. In
his lecture on _Useful Work versus Useless Toil_, the very title of which
is a flash of genius, he advocates the kind of education that is directed
toward finding out what different people are fit for, and helping them
along the road which they are inclined to take. He would have young people
taught "such handicrafts as they had a turn for as a part of their
education, the discipline of their minds and bodies; and adults would also
have opportunities of learning in the same schools." He preaches the
necessity of agreeable surroundings, claiming that science duly applied
would get rid of the smoke, stench, and noise of factories, and that
factories and buildings in which work is carried on should be made decent,
convenient, and beautiful, while workers should be given opportunities of
living in quiet country homes, in small towns, or in industrial colleges,
instead of being obliged to "pig together" in close city quarters. Not one
of these considerations is ignored by the organisations now endeavouring
in the name of civilisation to raise the standard of the community. Manual
training schools, free kindergartens, health protective associations,
model tenement societies, have all arisen to meet in their own ways the
needs to which Morris was so keenly alive. It was not the word reform,
however, but the word revolution, that he constantly reiterated, and
declined to relinquish in favour of any milder term. His friend William
Clarke has summed up in a single paragraph the substance of many
conversations held with him on the subject of social progress. "Existing
society is, he thinks, gradually, but with increasing momentum,
disintegrating through its own rottenness. The capitalist system of
production is breaking down fast and is compelled to exploit new regions
in Africa and other parts, where, he thinks, its term will be short.
Economically, socially, morally, politically, religiously, civilisation is
becoming bankrupt. Meanwhile it is for the Socialist to take advantage of
this disintegration by spreading discontent, by preaching economic
truths, and by any kind of demonstration which may harass the authorities
and develop among the people an _esprit de corps_. By these means the
people will, in some way or other, be ready to take up the industry of the
world when the capitalist class is no longer able to direct or control
it."
The expression "in some way or other" very well indicates the essential
vagueness underlying Morris's definite speech. He had no idea of the means
by which the people could be educated to the assumption of unfamiliar
control. The utmost that he could suggest was that they should be awakened
to the beauty of life as he saw it in his dreams. This beauty he
continually set before them in phrases as simple and as eloquent as he
could make them. Nor did he shirk the responsibilities raised by his
extreme point of view. Nothing testifies more truly to his fidelity of
nature and devotion to his ideal than his readiness to put aside the
pursuits he loved with his whole heart and take up activities detested by
him for many years of that gifted, interesting life of his, in the hope of
bringing about, for people whom he really cared for only in the mass, who
did not understand him and whom he did not very well understand, an order
of things which should in time, but not in his time, make them--so he
thought--quite happy. The extent to which he renounced was not slight.
Now indeed was the time when his friends might justly lament that he was
being kept labouring at what he could not do, with work all round that he
could do so well. First he joined the Democratic Federation and was
promptly put on its executive committee. We find him writing that it is
naturally harder to understand the subject of Socialism in detail as he
gets alongside of it, and that he often gets beaten in argument even when
he knows he is right, which only drives him to more desperate attempts to
justify his theories by the study of other people's arguments. While he
was a member of the Federation (a definitely Socialist body at the time)
he delivered a lecture at Oxford with the effect of rousing consternation
in the University despite the fact that he had taken pains to inform the
authorities of his position as an active Socialist. They did not
understand the extent of his activity, and when he wound up an agreeable
talk by frankly appealing to the undergraduates of the Russell Club, at
whose invitation he was speaking, to join the Democratic Federation, the
Master of University was brought to his feet to explain that nothing of
the kind had been foreseen when Mr. Morris was asked to express there "his
opinion on art under a democracy."
Besides his lecturing, which went on in London, or at Manchester, Leeds,
Blackburn, Leicester, Glasgow, and anywhere else where a hopeful
opportunity afforded, he was writing for the weekly paper of the
Federation, the little sheet called _Justice_, and also writing pamphlets
for distribution among the people. The measures urged in _Justice_ for
immediate adoption as remedies for the evils of existing society were:
Free Compulsory Education for all classes, together with the provision of
at least one wholesome meal a day in each school.
Eight Hours or less to be the normal Working day in all trades.
Cumulative Taxation upon all incomes above a fixed minimum not exceeding
L300 a year.
State Appropriation of Railways, with or without compensation.
The Establishment of National Banks, which shall absorb all private
institutions that derive a profit from operations in money or credit.
Rapid Extinction of the National Debt.
Nationalisation of the Land and organisation of agricultural and
industrial armies under State control on Cooeperative principles.
The objects of the Federation were: "To unite the various Associations of
Democrats and Workers throughout Great Britain and Ireland for the purpose
of securing equal rights for all, and forming a permanent centre of
organisation; to agitate for the ultimate adoption of the programme of the
Federation; to aid all Social and political movements in the direction of
these reforms." Morris believed himself to be in full sympathy with the
fundamental principles of the Federation, and faithfully resented the
assumption of a kindly intentioned critic who stated that his imperfect
sympathy with them must in charity be supposed. To the implication that he
cared only for art and not for the other side of the social questions he
had been writing about, he responded: "Much as I love art and ornament, I
value it chiefly as a token of the happiness of the people, and I would
rather it were all swept away from the world than that the mass of the
people should suffer oppression"; but he continued with the familiar
challenge, opportunity to utter which was seldom lost, "At the same time,
Sir, I will beg you earnestly to consider if my contention is not true,
that genuine Art is always an expression of pleasure in Labour?" In
explaining his point of view to the public before whom he placed his
little collection of Socialist lectures, he expressed his conviction that
all the ugliness and vulgarity of civilisation, which his own work had
forced him to look upon with grief and pain are "but the outward
expression of the innate moral baseness into which we are forced by our
present form of society." The ethical and practical sides of the problem
he was trying to face honestly, grew up in his mind as he dwelt upon its
artistic side, and he made noble efforts to evolve schemes of practical
expediency. In his reasonableness he went so far as to admit the possible
usefulness of machinery in the new order toward which he was directing the
attention of his followers; but he is swift to add, "for the consolation
of the artists," that this usefulness will probably be but temporary;
that a state of social order would lead, at first, perhaps, to a great
development of machinery for really useful purposes, "because people will
still be anxious about getting through the work necessary to holding
society together"; but after a while they will find that there is not so
much work to do as they expected and will have leisure to reconsider the
whole subject, and then "if it seems to them that a certain industry would
be carried on more pleasantly as regards the worker, and more effectually
as regards the goods, by using hand-work rather than machinery they will
certainly get rid of their machinery, because it will be possible for them
to do so." "It isn't possible now," he adds; "we are not at liberty to do
so; we are slaves to the monsters we have created. And I have a kind of
hope that the very elaboration of machinery in a society whose purpose is
not the multiplication of labour, as it now is, but the carrying on of a
pleasant life, as it would be under social order,--that the elaboration of
machinery, I say, will lead to the simplification of life, and so once
more to the limitation of machinery."
Although the discussion of methods and external forms was entirely foreign
to Morris's habit of mind, he was not averse to discussing the history of
society. He was not much more an historian than he was an economist in the
strict sense. He ignored, idealised, and blackened at will, always
perfectly certain that he was setting forth the contrast between the past
and the present in its true light; but his delight in the mediaeval past,
which was the only past to which he gave much attention, lends to his
pictures of it a charm most appealing to those who have not too prodding a
prejudice in favour of historical accuracy. He is at his best when he
breaks from his grapple with the subject of the commercial classes and
their development to evoke the visions which neither history nor economics
could obscure in his mind. "Not seldom I please myself with trying to
realise the face of mediaeval England," he says to the motley audience
gathering at a street corner or in some dingy little hall or shed to
listen to him, "the many chases and great woods, the stretches of common
tillage and common pasture quite unenclosed; the rough husbandry of the
tilled parts, the unimproved breeds of cattle, sheep, and swine;
especially the latter, so lank and long and lathy, looking so strange to
us; the strings of packhorses along the bridle-roads; of the scantiness of
the wheel-roads, scarce any except those left by the Romans, and those
made from monastery to monastery; the scarcity of bridges, and people
using ferries instead, or fords where they could; the little towns, well
bechurched, often walled; the villages just where they are now (except for
those that have nothing but the church left to tell of them), but better
and more populous; their churches, some big and handsome, some small and
curious, but all crowded with altars and furniture, and gay with pictures
and ornament; the many religious houses, with their glorious architecture;
the beautiful manor-houses, some of them castles once, and survivals from
an earlier period; some new and elegant; some out of all proportion small
for the importance of their lords. How strange it would be to us if we
could be landed in fourteenth-century England; unless we saw the crest of
some familiar hill like that which yet bears upon it a symbol of an
English tribe, and from which, looking down on the plain where Alfred was
born, I once had many such ponderings, we should not know into what
country of the world we were come: the name is left, scarce a thing
else."