William Morris: Poet, Craftsman, Socialist

by Elisabeth Luther Cary

The Roots of the Mountains was a favourite with Morris, and he planned for it an edition on Whatman paper and bound in two patterns of Morris and Company’s chintz. Some of the paper ordered for this edition was left over, and eventually was used by Morris for the first little post-quarto catalogues and prospectuses printed at Hammersmith. Thus the book formed a material link between the Chiswick Press and the Kelmscott Press.

Before the establishment of the latter, however, Morris gave one more book to Socialism. His News from Nowhere was the last of his works to appear in The Commonweal and was almost immediately reprinted from its pages by an American publisher. It is an account of the civilised world as it might be made, according to Morris’s belief, by the application of his principles of Socialism to life in general and in particular. In 1889 he had reviewed for The Commonweal Mr. Bellamy’s Looking Backward, with how much approbation may readily be imagined. As an expression of the temperament of its author he considered it interesting, but as a reconstructive theory unsafe and misleading. “I believe,” he said, “that the ideal of the future does not point to the lessening of man’s energy by the reduction of labour to a minimum, but rather to the reduction of pain in labour to a minimum so small that it will cease to be pain; a gain to humanity which can only be dreamed of till men are more completely equal than Mr. Bellamy’s Utopia would allow them to be, but which will most assuredly come about when men are really equal in condition; although it is probable that much of our so-called ‘refinement,’ our luxury,—in short, our civilisation,—will have to be sacrificed to it.” Early in 1890 appeared the first instalment of News from Nowhere, in which Morris set himself the task of correcting the impression produced by Mr. Bellamy’s views of the future by substituting his own picture of a reconstructed society, from which all the machinery that in Looking Backward was brought to so high a degree of efficiency is banished, and the natural energies of man are employed to his complete satisfaction. Homer’s Odyssey, which Morris at this time was translating by way of refreshment and amusement, may well have served as a partial inspiration for the brilliant, delicate descriptions of handicrafts practised by the art-loving people of Nowhere. We read in both of lovely embroideries; of fine woven stuffs, soft and pliant in texture, and deeply dyed in rich forgotten colours of antiquity; of the quaint elaboration and charm of metals wrought into intricate designs; of all beautiful ornament to be gained from the zeal of skilled and sensitive fingers. The image is before us in News from Nowhere of a life as busy and as bright as that of the ancient Greeks, whose cunning hands could do everything save divide use from beauty. As a natural consequence of happy labour, the inhabitants of Nowhere have also the superb health and personal beauty of the Greeks. Their women of forty and fifty have smooth skins and fresh colour, bright eyes and a free walk. Their men have no knowledge of wrinkles and grey hairs. Everywhere is the freshness and sparkle of the morning. The pleasant homes nestle in peaceful security among the lavish fruits of the earth. The water of the Thames flows clean and clear between its banks; the fragrance of flowers pervades the pages and suggests a perpetual summer; athletic sports are mingled with athletic occupations. There is little studying. History is sad and often shameful—why then study it? Knowledge of geography is not important; it comes to those who care to travel. Languages one naturally picks up from intercourse with the people of other countries. Political economy? When one practises good fellowship what need of theories? Mathematics? They would wrinkle the brow; moreover, one learns all that is necessary of them by building houses and bridges and putting things together in the right way. It is not surprising that in this buoyant life filled with active interests, the religion of which is good-will and mutual helpfulness, the thought of death is not a welcome one. A dweller in Nowhere admits that in the autumn he almost believes in death; but no one entertains such a belief longer than he must. Thus we get in this fair idyll the purely visible side of the society depicted. The depths of the human heart and of the human soul are left unsounded. To have what they desire, what is claimed by their hands, by their eyes, by their senses, is the aim of the people. Renunciation, like mathematics, would wrinkle the brow. Arbitrary restraint is not to be considered. Nothing is binding, neither marriage vow nor labour contract, or, to speak more precisely, neither marriage vow nor contract for labour exists. The people live, as we are told, as some of the so-called savages in the South Seas really do live,—in a state of interdependence so perfect that if an individual lays down an obligation the community takes it up. For the fading of life, for the death that may not delay till autumn to thrust itself upon the attention, for the development of spiritual strength to meet an enemy against whom art and beauty will not avail, for the battle with those temptations of the flesh that are not averted by health and comeliness, no provision is made. The author’s philosophy is that work, under pleasant conditions will do away with all the evils of both soul and body.

As a document for active Socialists News from Nowhere is not effective. Absolutely without any basis of economic generalisation, it is merely the fabric of a vision. At the time of writing it Morris was cutting the last threads that bound him to conventional Socialist bodies. He was making ready to live again, so far as modernity would let him, the life he loved. “No work that cannot be done with pleasure in the doing is worth doing,” was a maxim counted by him of the first importance, and assuredly he had not found pleasure in the management of Socialist organisations. His last Socialist book rings with the joy of his release. On its title-page it appears as Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, and it is interesting to see how he regarded the original Utopia, to Ralph Robinson’s translation of which he wrote a preface, issuing it from his own press in 1893. His interpretation of Sir Thomas More’s attitude is not the conventional one, and is inspired chiefly by his own attitude toward the great social question which he continued to ponder, insisting still upon his hope for a new earth.

“Ralph Robinson’s translation of More’s Utopia,” he says, “would not need any foreword if it were to be looked upon merely as a beautiful book embodying the curious fancies of a great writer and thinker of the period of the Renaissance. No doubt till within the last few years it has been considered by the moderns as nothing more serious than a charming literary exercise, spiced with the interest given to it by the allusions to the history of the time, and by our knowledge of the career of its author. But the change of ideas concerning ‘the best state of a publique weale,’ which I will venture to say is the great event of the end of this century, has thrown a fresh light upon the book; so that now to some it seems not so much a regret for days which might have been, as (in its essence) a prediction of a state of society which will be. In short this work of the scholar and Catholic, of the man who resisted what has seemed to most the progressive movement of his own time, has in our days become a Socialist tract familiar to the meetings and debating rooms of the political party which was but lately like ‘the cloud as big as a man’s hand.’ Doubtless the Utopia is a necessary part of a Socialist’s library; yet it seems to me that its value as a book for the study of sociology is rather historic than prophetic, and that we Socialists should look upon it as a link between the surviving Communism of the Middle Ages (become hopeless in More’s time, and doomed to be soon wholly effaced by the advancing wave of Commercial Bureaucracy), and the hopeful and practical progressive movement of to-day. In fact I think More must be looked upon rather as the last of the old than the first of the new.

“Apart from what was yet alive in him of mediæval Communist tradition, the spirit of association, which amongst other things produced the Gilds, and which was strong in the mediæval Catholic Church itself, other influences were at work to make him take up his parable against the new spirit of his age. The action of the period of transition from mediæval to commercial society, with all its brutalities, was before his eyes; and though he was not alone in his time in condemning the injustice and cruelty of the revolution which destroyed the peasant life of England and turned it into a grazing farm for the moneyed gentry; creating withal at one stroke the propertyless wage-earner and the masterless vagrant (hodie ‘pauper’), yet he saw deeper into its root-causes than many other men of his own day, and left us little to add to his views on this point except a reasonable hope that those ‘causes’ will yield to a better form of society before long.

“Moreover the spirit of the Renaissance, itself the intellectual side of the very movement which he strove against, was strong in him, and doubtless helped to create his Utopia by means of the contrast which it put before his eyes of the ideal free nations of the ancients, and the sordid welter of the struggle for power in the days of dying feudalism, of which he himself was a witness. This Renaissance enthusiasm has supplanted in him the chivalry feeling of the age just passing away. To him war is no longer a delight of the well-born, but rather an ugly necessity to be carried on, if so it must be, by ugly means. Hunting and hawking are no longer the choice pleasures of knight and lady, but are jeered at by him as foolish and unreasonable pieces of butchery; his pleasures are in the main the reasonable ones of learning and music. With all this, his imaginations of the past he must needs read into his ideal vision, together with his own experiences of his time and people. Not only are there bond slaves and a king, and priests almost adored, and cruel punishments for the breach of marriage contract, in that happy island, but there is throughout an atmosphere of asceticism which has a curiously blended savour of Cato the Censor and a mediæval monk.

“On the subject of war, on capital punishment, the responsibility to the public of kings and other official personages, and such-like matters, More speaks words that would not be out of place in the mouth of an eighteenth-century Jacobin, and at first sight this seems rather to show sympathy with what is now mere Whigism than with Communism; but it must be remembered that opinions which have become (in words) the mere commonplace of ordinary bourgeoise politicians were then looked on as a piece of startlingly new and advanced thought, and do not put him on the same plane with the mere radical life of the last generation.

Study of Mrs. Morris
Made by Rossetti for pictures called “The Day Dream”

“In More, then, are met together the man naturally sympathetic with the Communistic side of mediæval society, the protestor against the ugly brutality of the earliest period of commercialism, the enthusiast of the Renaissance, ever looking toward his idealised ancient society as the type and example of all really intelligent human life; the man tinged with the asceticism at once of the classical philosopher and of the monk, an asceticism, indeed, which he puts forward not so much as a duty but rather as a kind of stern adornment of life. These are, we may say, the moods of the man who created Utopia for us; and all are tempered and harmonised by a sensitive clearness and delicate beauty of style, which make the book a living work of art.