A Word for William Morris
William Morris. Prose Selections. Edited by A. H. R. Ball.
• (Cambridge University Press. 3s. 6d.)
WE arc an age founded on statistics rather than faith. Modern Socialism, even, has become a matter of numbers, forms, cards and annual reports. The sense of craft-pride has gone out of it, and it cares more for the sick • and sub- normal worker than it does• for the proud and healthy artisan. The latter has to mark time to keep step with the drab and dispirited member. Such is the dreary pass to which Fabianism and the economists have brought us. They have won the day ; they have thrown the artist out of politics. The fire and colour and splendour of William Morris and Ruskin are laughed at, or Patronized. The warm- hearted and impulsive elements have almost vanished from post-War politics. Only Mr. Shaw and Mr. Lansbury remain to remind us of that neo-Golden Age of the William Morris Mission and the Clarion Van. Those pioneers are even looked upon with suspicion as being dilettante and " art- and-crafty."
Our condition perhaps is one of the freaks of history, symptomatic of a period of national misery and bewilderment that by its very intensity must shortly move towards some remedy. A hundred years ago the country was in a similar condition. Between 1830 and 1850 an economic depression gripped England like a frost. Our modern experts will say I am fantastic in suggesting that the sunny and wide-flinging genius of fiery-haired William Morris played no small part in the ensuing thaw of the following half-century.
Coming after Ruskin and Carlyle, he fought like a giant on every possible front—art, crafts, literature, social reform --to push back the tide of ugliness and maddening repetition and monotony that the demon of the machine has let loose over the world. And that demon is Man himself ; the fool, the dolt, the genius who cannot realize the potentialities of beauty and strength which his own brain has created ! We are now in the grip of mass-production, and its horrible grasp is strangling our sense of beauty and destroying the economic balance of give and take in production and use of the earth's riches. Gigantic motor factories produce so much and so rapidly that they choke their own markets. A bumper crop of wheat in South America causes a panic on the corn exchanges of the world, and the price of bread rises, adding to the distress of the mechanics who have been discharged, from the motor factories.
Yet William Morris foresaw these gigantic follies. He warned hiS own generation of the dangers of the machine, end he explained how it could be used " as a boon and a blessing to man." Samuel Butler sat at his feet and so did Mr. Shaw. But master and disciples have all three been treated as dreamers, play-boys, mere artists, by the hard-headed men of affairs whose lack of humour and
imagination has landed the world in the morass with mankind underneath and the machine inverted on top of him, its wheels whirring away in a sort of demoniac finale before the explosion comes.
Perhaps after that explosion, mankind, the crestfallen victim of his own cleverness, will get up,.• feel his bruises, and realize humbly that Morris after all was a realist in economics and politics, and that when he said the following words he was able to back them by the example of his own practical efforts as a capitalist manufacturer and 'employer of labour : " I feel sure that the time will come when people will find it difficult to believe that a rich community such as ours, having such command over external nature, could have submitted to live such a mean, shabby, dirty life as we do."
Having such a happy belief in William Morris both as economist and artist (the two cannot really be separated, since the first principle of art is econorny.of material), I have enjoyed browsing over this well selected anthology of prose extracts from his work. It is divided into sections that roughly correspond with the different branches of his many activities. Those activities were vast and simultaneous ; as the doctor said who attended him when he died, " his disease was simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men."
One may not altcigether accept his belief that the Golden Age of mankind was in the Fourteenth Century. One may think that his political philcisaphy, founded on Ruskin's theory of the static nature of human society, is wrong and childlike. One may feel that the social fabric is like a suit of clothes that wears out and has to be replaced according to the present needs of the racial body ; and that to restrict our experiments to past cuts and cloths is foolish and wasteful of subsequent experience. But even with these reservations in one's mind, the belief in Morris's sterling political sound- ness remains. One thing alone vitiates his doctrines, and that is his assumption that the population must dwindle to proportions capable of being supported by local guild life. Up to the present the facts have not supported his assumption, and we therefore have been forced into our less picturesque and less individualistic political principles.
I have no space to speak of Morris the artist, the carpenter, the designer, the poet, and the man. The testimony of his remaining work, and of everybody who came under the influence of his exuberant genius—people from the kingly Rossetti down to the humblest puddler in the pottery at Merton Abbey—points to his greatness. Everything he did he did well and beautifully. He gave it the quality of his sun-like personality, the quality of golden light and joy. Here is an example of that quality, shining through his prose style. Notice the monosyllabic construction that makes it transparent in spite of all its richness. It is like the water- colour painting of the finest masters in that subtle art, men such as Cotman and Peter de Wint " The Abbey where we built the Church was not girt by stone walls, but by a circle of poplar trees, and whenever a wind passed over them, were it ever so little a breath, it set them all a-ripple ; and when the wind was high, they bowed and swayed very low, and the wind, as it lifted the leaves, and showed their silvery white sides, or as again in the lulls of it, it let them drop, kept on changing the trees from green to white, and white to green ; moreover, through the boughs and trunks of the poplars we caught glimpses of the great golden corn sea, waving, waving, waving for leagues and leagues ; and among the corn grew burning scarlet poppies, and blue corn-flowers ; and the corn-flowers were so blue, that they gleamed, and seemed to burn with a steady light, as they grew beside the poppies among the gold of the wheat. Through the corn sea ran a blue river, and always green meadows and lines of tall poplars followed its windings."
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