Complete Works of William Morris, page 810
“I am so vexed that you should have had all this trouble; except for the circumstances which you know of, I would have made a point of staying in London and seeing the matter through. I cannot find that beastly letter. When I saw you Monday week I put what letters I thought would be wanted into an envelope which I intended to give you, but I was so muddled by my own troubles that I daresay I did not; nor can I be sure that the letter was in it. Meantime I have written a letter to the bloody Times which I also inclose; if you think it worth while please send it on: after which I really don’t see what any of us can do till Magnússon comes back. I repeat I am so vexed that you should have been let in for such worrits — I am reminded of Swinburne’s view of providence when he said that he never saw an old gentleman give a sixpence to a beggar, but he was straightway run over by a ‘bus.”
But apart from all private anxieties, the pressure on Morris’ mind during these autumn and winter months seems from several indications to have been greater than it was either before or since. It is a curious sign of his loneliness and self–absorption at this time, that no two of his friends (so far as I am able to ascertain) agree in their view of the steps by which he became a convinced Socialist and the main influences — whether men or events or books — that served to shape his course at this time precisely in the way it took. His own letters of the time, so far as they exist, give little clue to any changes which were going on in his mind. The account which he himself gave some ten years later is no doubt abstractly accurate. “A brief period of political Radicalism,” he then wrote, “during which I saw my ideal clear enough, but had no hope of any realization of it, came to an end some months before I joined the Democratic Federation, and the meaning of my joining that body was, that I had conceived a hope of the realization of that ideal.” But for the growth of this hope no one cause can be assigned. He once said to Mr. G. B. Shaw that he had been converted to Socialism by Mill, in his posthumously published papers analyzing the system of Fourier, in which he “clearly gave the verdict against the evidence.” In the article already quoted, Morris alludes to these papers, and says that they put the finishing touch to his conversion. It may be doubted whether even this modified statement is not an unconscious over-statement, and whether Morris does not here mix up the causes of his conversion with the reasons by which that conversion could be justified. For some considerable time after he became a professed Socialist, he worked hard at the task of proving his belief. “I put some conscience into trying to learn the economical side of Socialism, and even tackled Marx, though I suffered agonies of confusion of the brain over reading the economics of that work.” But the belief, while it was not unreasoned, was not the outcome (if any belief be) of abstract economic reasoning.
While it is true to say that during these months Morris was moving towards Socialism, it would also be true to say that Socialism was moving towards him. It was “the consciousness of revolution stirring,” he says himself, which “prevented me, luckier than many others of artistic perceptions, from crystallizing into a mere railer against progress on the one hand, and on the other from wasting time and energy in any of the numerous schemes by which the quasi-artistic of the middle classes hope to make art grow when it has no longer any root.” His own beliefs and sympathies changed little, while the tendency of public thought was changing fast, and he might reasonably claim that, both before and after this so-called parting of the ways, he had, since he first began to think for himself, been consistent throughout his life. The history of the Socialist movement in England during the years which succeeded the war of 1870 has yet to be written; and a biographer would be straying far beyond the limits of his appointed task if he became an analyst of social conditions or a historian of institutions. But it must be noted that just at this time, that spirit of profound discontent, which is also a spirit of hope — which, unable to rest in the present, looks forward and not backward — was widely in the air. “All countries and all individuals hang to the past, but seem hardly to think of the future. I suppose we should, like the Jewish prophets, get the habit of looking onwards to the future and not backwards to the past.” Such, a generation earlier, had been the words of one of the great formative intelligences of the age, as he observed, not without a large degree of sympathy, the Chartist movement and the Christian Socialism of Kingsley and Maurice. It seemed now as if this spirit were once more in the ascendant. “The era of administration has come” was a phrase much in the mouths of economic writers. The Irish legislation of successive Governments had already, in the judgment of dispassionate observers, committed one, if not both, of the two great political parties to what might be properly called a Socialist programme. The International, though as an organized force it had been broken up in 1872, had even in its dispersion scattered widely the seeds of a cosmopolitan revolt against the domination of capital and of the middle classes. Its doctrines had to some extent permeated the leading English Trades Unions. Intelligent London artisans had in large numbers familiarized themselves with the doctrine of Karl Marx and the more recent theories of Henry George. At meetings of working men there were shouts for Revolution. The repressive measures taken in France and Austria after the Commune, and in Germany by Bismarck some years later, had incidentally filled London with foreign refugees, whose influence spread silently in many directions. The position may be summed up in Morris’ own words by saying that there was no longer, among the mass of the working class in London, any decided hostility to Socialism, and that the working man who took an interest in politics was generally in favour of Socialist tendencies so far as he understood them.
In 1881 an effort had been set on foot to organize the various Radical clubs of working men in different parts of London, and to give the organization a definite bias in favour of what were becoming known as Socialistic principles. The result was the formation of a body known as the Democratic Federation. Its programme was, broadly speaking, that of the political Radicalism of the time, and directed towards alterations in the mere machinery of government — annual Parliaments, payment of Members, abolition of the House of Lords, and the like. The only distinctively “Socialist” article in its creed was a claim, not further defined, for the nationalization of land.
But as time went on the Federation became, partly by the secession of members who belonged to the older school of Radicalism, partly by a new enthusiasm among the younger men, more and more Socialist in general tendency and sympathy: and the practical changes which it advocated all went in the direction of setting up a State Socialism of a somewhat drastic kind. The “Democrat without ulterior views” of the previous generation was becoming a Social Democrat; was asking what was the use of democratic institutions, and whether they were an end or only a means. Once this question was fairly raised, the whole existing system of society began to rock and waver. To the new analysis, the status of a middle class was as artificial, and therefore as capable of removal, as all the privileges and anomalies which had been swept away by that middle class itself, when once it took the pains to organize itself and set hand to the work. People were even beginning to ask themselves, with a sudden shock of disenchantment, what reason there was for the existence of a middle class at all.
“Numbers of young men,” such was the account given some seven years later by one of the most thoughtful leaders of the movement, which had then parted with some of its unreasoning enthusiasm and lost the dazzle of its earlier hope, “pupils of Mill, Spencer, Comte, and Darwin, roused by Mr. Henry George’s progress and Poverty,’ left aside evolution and free thought; took to insurrectionary economics; studied Karl Marx; and were so convinced that Socialism had only to be put clearly before the working classes to concentrate the power of their immense numbers in one irresistible organization, that the Revolution was fixed for 1889 (the anniversary of the French Revolution) at latest. The opposition we got was uninstructive: it was mainly founded on the assumption that our projects were theoretically unsound but immediately possible, whereas our weak point lay in the case being exactly the reverse.”
By one of those large and gradual changes of opinion which are seldom traceable to any distinct cause, the middle class had just then become deeply discredited. Matthew Arnold,after a lifetime spent in persistent efforts to arouse it to a sense of its own shortcomings, had abandoned the task in despair and given utterance to a new creed, that of hope in the working class; the creed which he formulated in an address delivered to the Ipswich Working Men’s College under the title Ecce convertimur ad Gentes. The change — so far as it was a change — that had passed over Morris was somewhat parallel, but led him towards utterance more violent in proportion to his imaginative ardour and the impatience of his temperament.
“I have no very ardent interest,” Arnold said in that address, “in politics in their present state in this country. What interests me is English civilization; and our politics in their present state do not seem to me to have much bearing upon that. Both the natural reason of the thing and also the proof from practical experience seem to me to show the same thing; that for modern civilization some approach to equality is necessary, and that an enormous inequality like ours is a hindrance to our civilization. Our middle classes know neither man nor the world; they have no light, and can give none.” So far the two men are in complete agreement; and though Morris might have expressed himself in phrases less lucidly temperate, there is even a curious and quite unpremeditated likeness in the language which they use. “Can the middle class regenerate themselves? “ Morris asks, and answers the question essentially as Arnold answered it. “At first sight,” are his words, “one would say that a body of people so powerful, who have built up the gigantic edifice of modern commerce, whose science, invention, and energy have subdued the forces of nature to serve their everyday purposes, and who guide the organization that keeps these natural powers in subjection in a way almost miraculous; at first sight one would say, surely such a mighty mass of wealthy men could do anything they please. And yet I doubt it. Why do not you — and I — set about doing this to-morrow? Because we cannot.”
“For twenty years,” Arnold went on in the Ipswich address, “I have been vainly urging this upon the middle classes themselves. Now I urge it upon you. Carry it forward yourselves, and insist on taking the middle class with you.” But Morris could not stand aloof to give counsel; he must needs be in the thick of the conflict. A passage in a lecture delivered at the beginning of 1884 seems to express his attitude precisely in the way that he felt and meant it. “The cause of art,” he there says,”is the cause of the people. We well-to-do people, those of us who love art, not as a toy, but as a thing necessary to the life of man, have for our best work the raising of the standard of life among the people. How can we of the middle classes, we the capitalists and our hangers-on, help? By renouncing our class, and on all occasions when antagonism rises up between the classes, casting in our lot with the victims; those who are condemned at the best to lack of education, refinement, leisure, pleasure, and renown; and at the worst, to a life lower than that of the most brutal of savages. There is no other way.”
There can be little doubt that this passage, though not written till after he had joined a Socialist organization, expresses with great accuracy the frame of mind which made him take the step of joining it. In addressing middle-class audiences this was the offer which he distinctly made them: “To these I offer a means,” were his words, repeated again and again on public platforms, “of renouncing their class by joining the only body in this country which puts forward constructive Socialism as its programme.”
That, if the privileged classes became merged in a Third Estate, national equality and national unity would be the result, is a thesis which may be variously argued either in abstract logic or from the lessons of history. But it is perhaps more to the point to ask how far it is possible in the nature of things that a man should renounce his class. Into that class he was born: in it he has grown and lived: it environs him with the constant pressure of an atmosphere: he clings to it and draws his daily life out of it by a thousand filaments of inherited tradition and acquired habit. To many it may seem that Arnold, and not Morris, in this instance pointed out the true path. Morris’ own language with regard to the matter, while not always strictly consistent, often indicates that he saw as clearly as any man the hopelessness of any attempt to elevate the working class from without. He never deceived himself into thinking that, by taking his stand thus on the side of those whom he called the workers, he had ceased himself to be a professional man, a hanger-on (for so he defined the term “professional man”) of the capitalist class. His hope was that at the touch of an external impulse leaders among the workers themselves might arise, with whom or under whom he might himself be permitted to work. It was only after years of disappointment that he realized that the time for this had not yet come. But his whole life bore witness to the sincerity and self–sacrificing devotion with which he followed the path he conceived to be that of his highest duty.
This renunciation of his own class at all events, so far as such a thing could be actually done, presented itself to him as a step which now more than ever would have, so far as he himself was concerned, real value and significance. His position in the eyes of the world was more than respectable; it might even be described, within limits, as famous. He had a recognized place in the first rank of living poets. He had no less recognized an authority on all matters relating to the theory and practice of the decorative arts. He was a well-known and (in spite of the temporary embarrassments which attended the first year of the work at Merton Abbey) a prosperous manufacturer, whose goods travelled far, and carried their own guarantee of excellence in design and workmanship. He might speak of renunciation as one who had something not inconsiderable to renounce. Just at the moment when he was making up his mind to take some decisive step, he was unanimously elected an Honorary Fellow of his College at Oxford; a distinction which, always rare, is generally reserved for old members who have attained the highest official rank in their profession, and implies a tribute to very special distinction in one who is not a Bishop or a Privy Councillor. This honour was conferred on him on the 13th of January, 1883. He had gone down to Bournemouth that day to see his daughter. “Such a pile of letters I found waiting me,” he wrote to her on the 17th, after coming back to London, “some of them like those of David Copperfield after he had become an author.” That same day he enrolled himself as a member of the Democratic Federation.
On his card of membership, which is signed by H. H. Champion, he is described as “William Morris, designer.” It was on his status as a workman that he based his claim to admission into the fighting rank of a working-class movement. The step, which in a sense cut him definitely away from respectability, was in no way a merely formal one. He took it with a full sense of its import. “I am truly glad,” were his words, with something of the grave joy of a convert, “that I have joined the only society I could find which is definitely Socialistic.” His support of the new movement, even before he formally joined it, had not been confined to theoretical sympathy. In the previous October he had sold the greater part of his valuable library, in order to devote the proceeds to the furtherance of Socialism. Though he was not exactly a bibliophile, many of these treasures cost him a pang to part with, from the “De Claris Mulieribus,” which had been his first purchase among the masterpieces of the early printers, down to oddly printed collections of Sagas from the Skálaholt Press, which he had acquired in Iceland. “If the modern books are unsaleable,” he wrote to Ellis, “perhaps you would let me take them out after your valuation, as I have no idea what they are worth to sell (though beastly dear to buy), and though I hate them and should be glad to be rid of them as far as pleasure is concerned, they are of some use to me professionally — though by the way I am not a professional man, but a tradesman.”
A few letters to Bournemouth during the winter indicate how his daily work went on, notwithstanding the excitement of the new departure. “Yesterday,” he writes on the 6th of December, “I spent the day at the South Kensington Museum. My opinion was wanted as to the value of a set of textiles which old Canon Bock has offered them: there were some very interesting pieces among them: a noble piece of Sicilian woven stuff of a pattern I haven’t seen before; a fine piece of 13th century Syrian silk with (real) Arab writing in it: some fragments of the very early cloths also, and a great quantity of good 17th century patterns; also a good collection of printed goods from the 14th century till the beginnings on the Wandle. I had also to decide as to whether the Museum should buy three large pieces of tapestry (of about 1530), but I refused them, as they were not really good, and had been gammoned badly: also they were too dear, £1,200 for the three and not worth more than £400 at the most. I have made three new patterns for embroidery, two small table-cloths, and one cushion.”
And on the 19th from Merton :
“It is a lovely day here, though it was dark and thick in town; but I cannot get about the works, for the gout has made another grab at me: it feels so queer to be here and a kind of prisoner to the house: however I have ordered the cab to be here at 6 to take me back to Hammersmith, and I have plenty of small designing work to do meantime. As to our printing, we are really not quite straight yet: I am quite ashamed of it: however they are doing Brother Rabbit successfully, and the Anemone will go on now, and when we are once out of this difficulty, I really think we shall have seen the worst of it. Item, we are going to get our wheel set straight during the Christmas holidays, so as not to stop work; the poor critter wants it very badly, for every now and then when there is not much water on, it really seems as if he stopped to think, like a lazy boy turning a grindstone. Well, here is an end of my paper, and Mr. Barret the wood-cutter come to see about cutting the design I made down there — I shall call it Christchurch, not Bournemouth.”
