All this is what is called “gossip,” and is supposed to have nothing to do with the works of a great writer. I record my belief, that the character and life experiences of an artist make his works of art, in the same way that a mold makes the image out of the liquid metal. The quickest route to the understanding of any novelist or poet is to know these personal details about him; and above all, his relationship to those who paid him the money which kept him alive from day to day. Whether he conforms, or whether he rebels, these money-forces condition a man’s life.
CHAPTER LXXIV
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.