William Morris
HAVING in mind the writing of this review, I asked a number of friends what they thought of William Morris : how did they rate him as a poet, what view did they take of his prose romances, how much did he contribute to the early theory of Socialism ? My questions drew blank. Nobody, it seemed, had read William Morris since the War. The sole exception was a W.E.A. student who had studied him in class. For the rest he had been consigned to the category of the great unread late Victorians, Ruskin and Carlyle and Meredith, whom our parents brought us up to revere in our youth; with the result that we have been content to ignore them ever since. There was no help for it but to set to work to read Morris for myself, an undertaking con- siderably lightened by the extremely attractive form in which the Nonesuch Press have chosen to serve him up. For, let it be said at once, in point of printing, binding and general lay-out this is a model of what a book should be. It is a pleasure to handle, a pleasure to read, and a pleasure to see on the shelves. Morris himself would have been delighted by it. The book contains in its six hundred and seventy beautifully printed pages "News from Nowhere," " The Dream of John Ball," two short stories in prose, " A King's Lesson " and " The Story of the Unknown Church," two long ones in verse, about thirty short poems and a dozen occasional lectures and essays. Mr. G. D. H. Cole, in an admirable introduction, tells the reader just what he wants to know about Morris, assesses his merits as a poet and his contribution as a Socialist, and concludes by presenting him primarily as a craftsman, a maker of beautiful things, who was driven to become a Socialist by his desire that others should be given the chance and the right to enjoy what he enjoyed : " I like best to think of him as the man who, loving beauty, wanted to make beauty a common nossession of all
mankind, and, realizing how much stood in the way, did not shrink from giving battle to giants."
What sort of impression do these admirably selected passages from the work of. a man who aroused such violent controversy in his own day mike upon the contemporary reader ? That Mr. Cole's attitude and estimates are right. that Morris was primarily a craftsman. It is from the standpoint of a craftsman, a designer. of patterns, that he writes his poetry. Writing poetry was for. him only one occupation among many, Having spent the day designing beautiful patterns in wallpapers, he Would.turn to designing beautiful patterns in words. The poetry at its best is beauti- ful, but it is often merely beauteous. Personally I found it difficult to read, and apt, except when inspired by the passionate resentment of injustice and hatred of ugliness which made Morris a Socialist, to lose itself in a lush jungle of words.
It was because the craftsman discovered that ordinary men and women were unable to appreciate the lovely things he cared for .that he became a Socialist. If it be said that he vastly overestimated the potential aesthetic interest of the ordinary man, and wrongly imputed to him something of his own creative power, he would reply, as he did in fact reply, that most people were never given the chance to dis- cover whether they had aesthetic interests or not, and that anyway all men were to some extent creative. It was this latter conviction that made him break out against the conditions of work in an industrial age. Morris followed Ruskin in emphasizing the close connexion between a man's work -and his life. Again and again in the lectures he strikes the same note ; work should be the chief outlet for man's creative impulse. Modern machinery, condemning the worker to the interminable performance of identically the same mechanical operation, was anathema to him because it failed to provide such an outlet. Even a Fordian millennium which had brought the hours of machine-minding down to four or five a day would have failed to satisfy him on the ground that a spirit dulled by even a few hours' mechanical routine work would be unable to make a right use of leisure.
The common charge against Morris, that by blindly denounc- ing machines as such he sought to keep mankind stationary in the Middle Ages, is not true. He did not disapprove of the use of machines as man's servants, but of their abuse as man's masters. In his essay, " A Factory as it might be," omitted from the standard edition of his works but included here by Mr. Cole, lie tells us that " machines of the most ingenious and best-approved kinds will be used when necessary, but will be used simply to save human labour." The distinctive characteristic of Morris's thought is his insistence that work without pleasure is no less a curse than production without beauty. One, in fact, is the source of the other. The quality of human life is more important than the quantity of human production. If, therefore, the use of machines is going to rob men's work of pleasure and their products of beauty, they had better not be used. It is not, of course, clear that machines must have this effect, or even that Morris thought that they must. What is clear is that they usually have had, and, in so far as' they have, who shall say that Morris's settle of values is wrong ?
C. E. M. JOAD.
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