William Morris: Romantic to revolutionary
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
William Morris: Romantic to revolutionary Details
First U.S. edition. xii, 829 pages. stiff paper wrappers.. thick 8vo.. Read more
Reviews
Roughly two-thirds of the book's 762 pages are devoted to the last thirteen years of Morris' life, with 210 pages - a quarter of the book - given to a massively detailed account of the six and a half years from 1884 to 1890 in which Morris was involved with the Socialist League.Before that he had been preoccupied with other things - with the Firm he had established in 1861 to produce craft-produced furniture, tapestry, stained glass, tiles, and all manner of household articles. He had written about the philosophy behind this work: his disgust with mass-production and how this damaged the dignity of labour, with inauthentic gothicism, inauthentic "restoration" of ancient buildings, and with vulgarity ("shoddiness") of design. At this stage his hatred of the market was for the debasement for which it was responsible.He was also a prolific poet, and Thompson, who has a fine eye for literary criticism, analyzes (and sits in judgment on) much of this at length. He also discusses at length the writings, for example, of Keats, Ruskin, Carlyle and other authors who influenced Morris. We also have a good deal about the Pre-Raphaelites, to whom he was very close in his early years and with one of whom, Burne-Jones, he worked in close friendship and partnership throughout his life. Morris was rather unhappily married to Jane Burden, who had modelled for most of the other pre-Raphaelites. There is a touching account of Morris' reactions when his wife had an affaire with Rossetti. He believed in the equality of the sexes and in women's liberation, but he tortured himself with the question of whether he was being "manly" or "unmanly" in his acquiescence - he had even twice left Jane and Rossetti together in his house in Kelmscott while he went off to Iceland (the home of the Nordic sagas which portrayed a type of hero that a grip on his imagination comparable to the grip of the Arthurian Legend.) All this occupies the first third of the biography.But the main thing that interested Thompson was Morris' embrace of Socialism. Morris had come to the conclusion that there was a need to go beyond escaping from the ugliness of the outer materialist capitalist world merely by entering into an inner world of the imagination, and to do something active to overthrow that outer world.In January 1883, at the age of 48, he joined Hyndman's not quite two-year old Social Democratic Federation. At the time Morris was totally ignorant of Marxist theory, but he now read it up. Marxism showed him how "all his previous thought came into unity". Though "much of it [Marxist theory] appears to be to be dreary rubbish, I am, I hope, a Socialist none the less." He defined his own views as Practical Socialism - and very theoretical and impractical it would turn out to be!The market was now identified as being not only debasing, but the very essence of capitalism and imperialism. By May he was on the executive as Treasurer. But in December 1884 he split with the SDF and formed a rival socialist movement, the Socialist League. At issue had been the Etonian Hyndman's dictatorial behaviour, his jingoism (he supported Imperialism, patriotism, a strong navy and was opposed to Home Rule), his dislike of and intrigues against the foreign members of the executive, and his patrician attitude to the working class and the trade unions.It was only after the split that rival ideologies between the two bodies developed. The League was "purist": it renounced reformism and parliamentary engineering, proclaimed that the old order can be overthrown only by violence, and identified the "aristocracy of labour" and their use of trade unionism as enemies of the working class: strikes should be aimed at capitalism, not merely at getting a better wages or working conditions within capitalism. The League rejected jingoism and capitalist imperialism, and thought Home Rule was "humbug" if it did not also embrace socialism. In 1886 the League had perhaps 600 to 700 members, the SDF 1,300 to 1,400.But this extreme purism which was preached by Morris was not shared by about half the League's members who still believed in parliamentary action. In May 1888 the majority on the League Council drove out the "parliamentarians".This gave dominance within the League's executive to the Anarchists. They repudiated all authority and all collective discipline. Morris was not an Anarchist, and he now began to feel uncomfortable being associated with them. The Anarchists in the League rejected all social bonds, whereas Morris believed that men could only develop their full individualities in the framework of communities. In 1889 he defined himself as a Communist (and attended the Marxist Second International that year). The Socialism he worked for would be an essential but only transititory phase: the bureaucracy of State Socialism could be as stifling of individuality as was that of the capitalist state. In November 1890 he severed his relationship with it. Only his own branch in Hammersmith remained as a platform from which he could carry on, in a much less active form, his own brand of socialism. As for the League, it finally collapsed amid the squabbling of those who had remained behind, just two months after Morris had left it.In the meantime the labour movement was making gains which sidelined British Marxism in general and "purism" in particular: the great dock strike of 1889, the development of New Unionism, the growing influence of the Fabians, the appearance of "Lib-Lab" members of Parliament, the rise of the number of workingmen adopted as parliamentary candidates by the Liberal Party (13 were returned in 1892); the foundation of the Independent Labour Party in 1893. All this Morris wryly appreciated, with the hope that genuine socialist theory would one day permeate these new structures.He now entered a new phase in his artistic work to which he now gave more time. But he no longer saw, as he once did, the Arts and Crafts movement as a force that might transform a philistine society: he plunged back into it simply because he enjoyed it. He now turned to the creation of the Kelmscott Press and the production of fine books.In 1890 he had published "News from Nowhere", a novel which takes the form of a dream in which a future world has become socialist. But then he wrote several novels in which he also escapes into a dream world, but now into one in which politics as such does not figure; instead he portrays an idyllic mythical past world, complete with archaisms of speech, which is in contrast to the real world of his time: he returns to the romanticism which had inspired his poetry before he became politically active.Morris comes out of this book as an admirable, rounded, humane, lovable, larger-than-life, idealistic and hugely energetic personality, and the generous quotations from his writings show how magnificently he expressed himself. Of course his purism meant that, for all the inspiration he provided to Socialism, the effective working class movements in every country left him behind - but it also meant that sooner or later in every country they compromised with bourgeois capitalism - sooner in the West, later in Russia and in China (not that Bolshevism and Maoism ever allowed for the dignity of individualism within the community which was so dear to Morris). They have all become servants of Capitalism. No working class movement dares to challenge it, and none claims these days that it even wants to: the most they aspire to is "fairer capitalism", "responsible capitalism"; the markets continue to rule supreme; the banks and economic imperialism carry all before them. One warms to Morris in part because he had warned in vain against all that.