PUBLIC LIFE AND SOCIALISM (_Continued_).
By the latter part of 1884 the political agitations and internal
differences in the Federation, now called The Social Democratic
Federation, became so violent as to force Morris to leave the association
in which he had had no desire to be a leader, but had been unable to keep
the position of acquiescent follower. In his connection with this and
other public organisations, the underlying gentleness and real humility of
his nature was clearly to be seen. He learned patience through his
conflict with unsympathetic minds. From the weary experience of working in
constant intercourse with men whose temper and practice and many of whose
theories were directly antagonistic to his own, although identified with
them in the public mind by a common responsibility, he learned to subdue
those elements of his temperament that worked against the success of what
he had most loyally at heart. From self-confidence, a critical habit, an
overbearing positiveness of assertion, he passed to comparative
reticence, tolerance, even docility. To his equals it was painful to see
ignorant men assign to him his task, but he never failed to comply
instantly with their orders.
[Illustration: MERTON ABBEY WORKS]
[Illustration: WASHING CLOTH AT THE MERTON ABBEY WORKS]
It could not, however, have been an education in which he could take
conscious pleasure, and at this juncture he doubtless would have been
happy indeed could he have gone quietly back to the weaving and dyeing and
writing of poetry with which his new preoccupation had seriously
interfered. His conscience, however, was too deeply involved to permit a
desertion, which would, he said, be dastardly. The question now constantly
in his mind was how he would have felt against the system under which he
lived had he himself been poor. He was convinced that he would have found
it unendurable. Therefore, with a longing glance at his chintz bleaching
in the sunlight and pure air of Merton Abbey, he put his shoulder to the
wheel again, and, gathering together a few of his sympathisers,
inaugurated a new party, the Socialist League, with the famous little
_Commonweal_ for its organ, a monthly paper now the joy of collectors on
account of the beautiful headings of Walter Crane and the remarkable
quality of the contributions by Morris himself. In this new society, for
which he was primarily responsible, Morris found his work redoubled. He
was editor of the _Commonweal_ as well as contributor to it. He continued
his lecturing, often under the most depressing conditions, speaking to
small and indifferent audiences in small and miserable quarters. At
Hammersmith he instituted a branch of the League in the room previously
given up to his carpet-weaving, and there he gave Sunday evening
addresses. On Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings he spoke at the
outdoor meetings which were to be the insidious foes of his health, and
which more than once brought him into personal notoriety of a disagreeable
kind.
The first of these occasions was on the 21st of September, 1885, when a
number of people were arrested for gathering together that Sunday morning
at the corner of Dod Street and Burdett Road against orders from the
authorities to the effect that meetings at that place--a favourite spot
with open-air speakers--must be stopped. Morris, with other members of the
League, was present in court when the prisoners were brought up, and
joined in the hisses and cries of "Shame!" when one prisoner was sentenced
to two months' hard labour and the others were fined. Morris was arrested,
subjected to a little questioning from the magistrate, and dismissed. The
following Sunday another meeting, comprising many thousands of people, was
held on the forbidden corner; nothing occurred, and they dispersed
victoriously. The next year a Sunday-morning meeting in a street off
Edgeware Road was interfered with by the police, and Morris was summoned
to the police court and fined a shilling and costs for the offence of
obstructing the highway.
Out of these experiences resulted, we may very well imagine, the farce
entitled: _The Tables Turned; or, Nupkins Awakened_, given at an
entertainment in the Hall of the Socialist League, at Farringdon Road, on
October 15, 1887. Copies of it are still in existence--sorry little
pamphlets in blue wrappers, bearing no kinship to the aristocratic
products of the Kelmscott Press so soon to follow, but extremely
entertaining as showing Morris in his least conventional and most
aggressive public mood. As the pamphlet is quite rare, a brief description
of its contents is not, perhaps, superfluous, although its literary merit
amounts to as little as possible considering its authorship. It opens with
a scene in a court of justice, Justice Nupkins presiding, in which a Mr.
La-di-da is found guilty of swindling and of robbing the widow and the
orphan. He is sentenced to imprisonment for the space of one calendar
month. Next Mary Pinch, a poor woman (the part was taken by Morris's
daughter May), is accused of stealing three loaves of bread, and, after
absurd and contradictory testimony by witnesses for the prosecution
(constables and sergeants), is sentenced to eighteen months of hard
labour. Next, John Freeman, a Socialist, is accused of conspiracy,
sedition, and obstruction of the highway. The Archbishop of Canterbury
(this role enacted by Morris), Lord Tennyson, and Professor Tyndall are
called as witnesses and give testimony, the manner and speech of the
renowned originals being somewhat rudely parodied. After contradictory
evidence by these witnesses and the former ones, the prisoner is sentenced
to six years' penal servitude with a fine of one hundred pounds, his
offence having been an open-air speech advocating the principles of
Socialism. As his sentence is pronounced the _Marseillaise_ is heard, and
a Socialist ensign enters with news that the Revolution has begun.
It is in the second part that the tables are turned upon Nupkins. The
scene this time is laid in the fields near a country village, with a copse
close by. The time is after the Revolution. Justice Nupkins is found
skulking in the copse, half mad with fear at the reversal of social
conditions, his past cruelty giving him small reason to hope for gentle
treatment at the hands of the former "lower classes," who are now running
affairs to suit themselves. He meets Mary Pinch, who pities his deplorable
aspect and invites him to her house, now a pleasant and prosperous home.
He cannot believe in the sincerity of her apparent kindness, and flees
from her in a panic, only to meet other of his former victims who further
alarm him by pretending to arrest him and give him a mock trial, during
which he thinks he is to be sentenced to death. He learns at last that
under the beautiful new order he is free to do what he pleases, and may
dig potatoes and earn his own living by such tilling of the soil. The
citizens dance about him singing the following words to the tune of the
_Carmagnole_:
What's this that the days and the days have done?
Man's lordship over man hath gone.
How fares it, then, with high and low?
Equal on earth they thrive and grow.
Bright is the sun for everyone;
Dance we, dance we the Carmagnole.
How deal ye, then, with pleasure and pain?
Alike we share and bear the twain.
And what's the craft whereby ye live?
Earth and man's work to all men give.
How crown ye excellence of worth?
With leave to serve all men on earth.
What gain that lordship's past and done?
World's wealth for all and everyone.
This somewhat childlike but not too bland revenge on the powers of the law
met with an enthusiastic reception at the Hall of the Socialist League;
Mr. Bernard Shaw, who was present, declaring that there had been no such
successful "first night" within living memory.
The year 1887 was marked, however, by events much more serious than the
acting of a little farce. On the 13th of November,--"Bloody Sunday" it was
called,--the efforts of the Government to check open-air speaking
culminated in an organised riot on the part of the Socialists in alliance
with the extreme Radicals. Sir Charles Warren had prohibited by
proclamation the holding of any meeting in Trafalgar Square,--a meeting
having been announced to take place there to protest against the Irish
policy of the Government. Thereupon it was agreed by the Socialist League,
the Social Democratic Federation, the Irish National League, and certain
Radical clubs that their members should assemble at various centres and
march toward Trafalgar Square. Morris put himself at the head of the
Clerkenwell contingent, first delivering a short speech mounted on a cart
in company with Mrs. Besant and others. He declared that wherever it was
attempted to put down free speech it was a bounden duty to resist the
attempt by every possible means, and told his audience that he thought
their business was to get to the Square by some means or other; that he
intended to do his best to get there, whatever the consequences might be,
and that they must press on like orderly people and good citizens. Thus
pressing on, with flags flying and bands playing, they were met at the
Bloomsbury end of St. Martin's Lane by the police, mounted and on foot,
who charged in among them, striking right and left, and causing complete
disorder in the ranks. The triumph of law and order over the various
columns of the demonstrators was soon complete, and the outcome consisted
of the arrest of three hundred men or more (many of whom were sent to
prison and a few condemned to penal servitude) and the killing of three.
The first to die was Alfred Linnell, for whom a public funeral was
given--great masses of men marching in perfect and solemn order to Bow
Cemetery, where he was buried, the service at the grave being read by the
light of a lantern. Such an event would inevitably stir Morris to
sympathetic rage, and the dirge written by him to be sung as poor Linnell
was buried has an inflammatory sound despite the obvious effort at
restraint:
We asked them for a life of toilsome earning,
They bade us bide their leisure for our bread;
We craved to speak to tell our woful learning,
We came back speechless, bearing back our dead!
Thus time was spent. Sometimes Morris was heading processions "with the
face of a Crusader," says Joseph Pennell, describing one occasion on which
he led a crowd, "among the red flags, singing with all his might the
_Marseillaise_"--into Westminster Abbey to attend the Sunday services.
Sometimes he was bailing out his friends who had been "run in" by the
police. Sometimes he was tramping, whatever the weather, at the head of
the workless workers of Hammersmith to interview the Guardians of the
Poor. Sometimes he was delivering his lectures among woful hovels in
tumbledown sheds to a score or so of people of whose comprehension he felt
most doubtful. Always he was preaching "Education toward Revolution," but
with an ever-increasing consciousness that a vast amount of education was
needed before revolution could be effectively reforming. His imagination
had formed great ideals and had pictured those ideals in triumphant
practice, but his practical sense was sufficient to show him the futility
of unintelligent action. He had spent much money, not in profit-sharing
among his workmen (although this obtained to a certain extent in his
business), but in bearing the various and heavy expenses imposed by the
publication of the organs of Socialism, which he supported almost as
largely by his purse as by his pen, and by a thousand other needs of the
cause to which in 1882 he had also sacrificed the greater part of his
valuable library. He had spent much time, which, to one so deeply
interested in pursuits for which any one life is far too short, meant
infinitely more than the expenditure of money or the relinquishing of
property that, after all, may be got back again. And he had worked against
the grain with all sorts and conditions of companions, from whom he was as
widely separated as the east is from the west--never more widely than when
he was marching by their side toward a goal that neither could see
clearly. He was now longing more and more to get back to his own life and
away from a life so foreign. As he had said in the first flush of his
enthusiasm, "Art must go under," he was now prepared "to see all organised
Socialism run into the sand for a while." It is not surprising that he
"somehow did not seem to care much" when the Socialist League became
disintegrated and insolvent. He had done his best for it, but its
strongest members had drifted away from it, the executive control had been
gained by a group of Anarchists, and Morris had been by these deposed
from the editorship of the _Commonweal_. Before the society reached its
lowest depths he resigned, giving expression in the _Commonweal_ for the
15th of November, 1890, to his feeling in the form it then took toward the
movement which so long had carried him out of his course and kept him in
turbulent waters. This movement had then been going on for about seven
years. Those concerned in it had made, he thought, "about as many mistakes
as any other party in a similar space of time." When he first joined it he
hoped that some leaders would turn up among the workingmen who "would push
aside all middle-class help and become great historical figures." This
hope he had pretty well relinquished. In the beginning there had been
little said about anything save the great ideals of Socialism, but as the
Socialist idea had become more and more impressed upon the epoch a
somewhat vulgarised and partial realisation of these ideals had pressed
upon the friends of the cause. They began to think of methods, and mostly
of "methods of impatience," as Morris from his ripened and moderated point
of view now designated them. "There are two tendencies in this matter of
methods," he said; "on the one hand is our old acquaintance, palliation,
elevated now into vastly greater importance than it used to have, because
of the growing discontent, and the obvious advance of Socialism; on the
other is the method of partial, necessarily futile, inconsequent revolt,
or riot rather, against the authorities, who are our absolute masters, and
can easily put it down.
"With both these methods I disagree; and that the more because the
palliatives have to be clamoured for, and the riots carried out by men who
do not know what Socialism is, and have no idea what their next step is to
be, if, contrary to all calculation, they should happen to be successful.
Therefore, at the best, our masters would be our masters still, because
there would be nothing to take their place. _We are not ready for such a
change as that!_" The time was favourable, he thought, for preaching the
simple principles of Socialism regardless of the policy of the passing
hour, nor was any more active work desirable. "I say, for us _to make
Socialists_," he concluded, "is _the_ business at present, and at present
I do not think we can have any other useful business. Those who are not
really Socialists--who are Trades Unionists, disturbance-breeders, or what
not--will do what they are impelled to do, and we cannot help it. At the
worst there will be some good in what they do; but we need not and cannot
heartily work with them, when we know that their methods are beside the
right way.
"Our business, I repeat, is the making of Socialists, _i.e._, convincing
people that Socialism is good for them and is possible. When we have
enough people of that way of thinking, _they_ will find out what action is
necessary for putting their principles in practice. Therefore, I say,
make Socialists. We Socialists can do nothing else that is useful."
This was practically the end of militant Socialism for Morris. Together
with a handful of his true followers and sympathisers he did organise or
reorganise under very simple rules a little society named the Hammersmith
Socialist Society, which took the place of the Hammersmith Branch of the
Socialist League. The manifesto explained that the separation had been
made because the members of the new society did not hold the Anarchistic
views of the majority of the old society's members, and would be likely to
waste in bickering time "which should be spent in attacking capitalism."
The business of the Hammersmith Society was to spread the principles of
Socialism, the method so warmly recommended by Morris in his _Commonweal_
article. But it was obvious that his interest was no longer keen in even
this passive mode of advancing the cause for which he had laboured so long
and, on the whole, so thanklessly. He set himself dutifully to work at
writing the manifesto, but complained, "I would so much rather go on with
my Saga work."
It cannot be said, however, that he was inconsistent. He had gone into
militant Socialism as he went into everything, with a superabundant energy
that must work itself off in activity. But there was more vehemence than
narrowness in his partisanship. When his party forsook the principles for
the sake of which he had joined it, he forsook the party. He learned of
human nature much that was discouraging during his efforts to make many of
his fellows work together in harmony, but he brought out of the fiery
experience an unharmed ideal. And among the clashing of creeds and the
warring of minds he played the part of peacemaker to an extent remarkable
in so impulsive a nature. "It seemed as though he wanted to have all his
own way," says one of his acquaintances, "yet put him in the chair at a
meeting and he was as patient as the mildest of us." His inmost belief was
much the same at the end as at the beginning,--matured by study and
tempered by practical failures, but holding to the fundamental idea that
art is the great source of pleasure in human life as well as pleasure's
best result, and must be made possible for everyone to practise with a
free mind and a body unwearied by hopeless toil. The letter to the _Daily
Chronicle_ of the 10th of November, 1893, on "Help for the Miners, the
Deeper Meaning of the Struggle," sounds the familiar note as positively as
ever, and contains all that is required to represent the creed of his
later years. "I hold firmly to the opinion," he says in this letter, "that
all worthy schools of art must be in the future, as they have been in the
past, the outcome of the aspirations of the people towards the beauty and
true pleasure of life. And, further, now that democracy is building up a
new order, which is slowly emerging from the confusion of the commercial
period, these aspirations of the people towards beauty can only be born
from a condition of practical equality, of economical condition amongst
the whole population. Lastly, I am so confident that this equality will be
gained that I am prepared to accept, as a consequence of the process of
that gain, the apparent disappearance of what art is now left us, because
I am sure that that will be but a temporary loss, to be followed by a
genuine new birth of art which will be the spontaneous expression of the
pleasure of life innate in the whole people. This, I say, is the art which
I look forward to, not as a vague dream, but as a practical certainty,
founded on the general well-being of the people. It is true that the
blossom of it I shall not see; therefore I may be excused if, in common
with other artists, I try to express myself through the art of to-day,
which seems to us to be only a survival of the organic art of the past, in
which the people shared, whatever the other drawbacks of their condition
might have been.... Yet if we shall not (those of us who are as old as I
am) see the New Art, the expression of the general pleasure of life, we
are even now seeing the seed of it beginning to germinate. For if genuine
art be impossible without the help of the useful classes, how can these
turn their attention to it if they are living amidst sordid cares which
press upon them day in, day out? The first step, therefore, towards the
new birth of art must be a definite rise in the condition of the workers;
their livelihood must (to say the least of it) be less niggardly and less
precarious, and their hours of labour shorter; and this improvement must
be a general one and confirmed against the chances of the market by
legislation. But, again, this change for the better can only be realised
by the efforts of the workers themselves. 'By us, and not for us,' must be
their motto.... What these staunch miners have been doing in the face of
such tremendous odds other workmen can and will do; and when life is
easier and fuller of pleasure people will have time to look around them
and find out what they desire in the matter of art, and will also have
time to compass their desires."
Just why Morris with his extreme independence stopped short of Anarchism
is difficult to see unless it be attributed to an instinct for order
inherited from the sturdy stock to which he belonged. The necessity of a
public rule of action was always, however, quite clear to him. He
contended that you have a right to do as you like so long as you do not
interfere with your neighbour's right to do as he likes, a contention
which not even a fairly conservative mind finds very difficult to uphold:
he was not willing to admit the right of an individual to act
"unsocially." Indeed all the charm of his pictures of the ideal life
derives from the atmosphere of loving-kindness and mutual helpfulness with
which he surrounds them. The Golden Rule was always in his mind as he
built up in his imagination his Paradise on earth. He possessed the
optimism of the kind-hearted, the faith in his fellow men that made him
sure of their right acting could they only start afresh with a field clear
of injury and abuse. He never dreamed in all his dreaming that these would
again grow up and destroy the beautiful fabric of his new Society, so
bright and unspotted in his mind. Of course there would be a social
conscience "which, being social, is common to every man." Without that
there could be no society; and "Man without society is not only impossible
but inconceivable." Thus he argued and thus he believed. His militant
Socialism had, while it lasted, a very dangerous side. His Socialist
"principles" are easily torn to ribbons by the political economist in
possession of facts showing the increasing prosperity of the working
classes and their increasing interest under existing conditions in the
arts and in education; but regarding his views merely as representing one
aspect of his impressive personality, it is easy to find them attractive.
To quote what the _Pall Mall Gazette_ said of the Sunday evenings at the
Hammersmith Hall, "They are patches of bright colour in the great drab,
dreary, dull, and dirty world." They bring with them such thoughts as
Arnold had of the repose that has fled "for ever the course of the river
of Time." The spirit breathed through them in strong contrast to the
spirit of many of his co-workers, ennobles all efforts toward true reform,
diffuses the love of humanity among a cold people, and makes for the
innocent and exquisite happiness which our human nature is so apt
paradoxically to deny us. In Morris's world we should all be very happy if
we were like Morris. He was not very happy in our world, yet perhaps he
managed to get out of it as much of the joy of doing as it can be made to
yield to any one man. His Socialism, from one point of view, was certainly
a tremendous failure, but no other side of his life visible to the public
at large showed so plainly his moral virtues, his generosity, his
sincerity, his power of self-sacrifice, his effort toward self-control. It
was significant that when, with a last rally of his forces to active work
for the cause, he joined in a concerted effort to unite all Socialists
into a single party, he was chosen as the best man for the purpose, all
the societies having "a deep regard and respect for him." It is even more
significant that his own employees in his large business also esteemed him
highly, feeling the sincerity with which he tried to make his practices
accord with his theories. If his business was a successful one it was not
because he tried to get from his workmen the utmost he could claim in time
and labour. The eight-hour working-day was in practice in the Merton
factory, and the wages paid were the highest known in the trade. He was
free from the self-complacency that gives to justice the name of charity,
and he was not distinguished for civility toward the people under his
direction, but he was, they said in their emphatic and expressive
vernacular, "the sort of bloke you always could depend upon."
Toward the end of his activity for the cause of Socialism he became
connected with a society which perhaps would not have existed without his
influence, although he was not directly responsible for its formation.
This was the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society [founded in 1888], the
aims of which were described by one of its members in the following words:
"To assert the possibilities of Art in design, applied even to the least
pretentious purpose and in every kind of handicraft; to protest against
the absolute subjection of Art in its applied form to the interests of
that extravagant waste of human energy which is called economic
production; to claim for the artist or handicraftsman, whose identity it
has been the rule to hide and whose artistic impulse it has been the
custom to curb (until he was really in danger of becoming, in fact as in
name, a mere hand), some recognition and some measure of appreciation; to
try and discover whether the public cared at all, or could be brought to
care, for the Art which, good or bad, is continually under their eyes; and
whether there might not be, in association with manufacture, or apart from
it, if that were out of the question, some scope for handicraft, some hope
for Art."
Morris's point of view is apparent in these aims, and the society was
composed chiefly of young men who, says Mr. Mackail, "without following
his principles to their logical issues or joining any Socialist
organisation, were profoundly permeated with his ideas on their most
fruitful side,--that of the regeneration, by continued and combined
individual effort, of the decaying arts of life." The Art Workers' Guild,
dating from 1884, was the source from which the new society sprang, the
immediate purpose of the latter being to get the work of men who combined
art with handicraft before the public by means of exhibitions, the
committees of the Royal Academy and kindred associations refusing to
accept examples of applied art for the exhibitions which they devoted to
what they called "fine art proper." Mr. Mackail calls attention to the
fact that Morris at this stage of his life was so thoroughly imbued with
the idea that the general public were ignorant of and indifferent to
decorative art, as to feel more sceptical of the success of the
exhibitions than was justified by their outcome. He lent his aid, however,
with his customary energy, guaranteeing a considerable sum of money, and
contributing some valuable papers and lectures, the exhibitions being
combined with instruction by acknowledged masters of handicraft. In 1891
he was elected President of the Society, holding that office until the
time of his death, when he was succeeded by Walter Crane. He was a member
of the Art Workers' Guild as well, and was elected Master of the Guild in
1892. He also belonged to the Bibliographical Society formed in that year,
and in 1894 was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
The societies were all directly concerned with questions in which Morris
had all his life been interested, and his connection with them was not
only natural but almost inevitable. He was not a man to whom public
business made a strong appeal. He undertook it with reluctance and
relinquished it with delight. Nor did he care for the labels of
distinction for which most men, even among the greatly distinguished, have
a measure of regard. He was, however, gratified when, in 1882, he was
unanimously elected Honorary Fellow of Exeter College at Oxford, an honour
which is rarely conferred, and is generally reserved, says Mr. Mackail,
"for old members who have attained the highest official rank in their
profession."