William Morris: Poet, Craftsman, Socialist

by Elisabeth Luther Cary

CHAPTER VII.

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.”

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 mediævalist; 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 Athenæum 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?