WILLIAM MORRIS (Born March 24th, 1834)
By LORD OLIVIER
WILLIAM MORRIS was an Aesthete—a name which, the Industrial Revolution having well nigh destroyed the thing, had to be borrowed from Greek and can only be translated, not quite exactly, in Latin—one capable of perception, or sensitive to his own perceptions. The nearest predecessor of the word in the same connexion was Connoisseur, current among the cultured of Morris's youth and those who had the means to buy works of Art, to designate one who, if he did not himself perceive, at any rate had acquired a knowledge of what was what in that province, and could tell you where the Brown Tree should be in a picture. The aesthetes whom Morris called into being were duly served with the critical half- bricks appropriate to such foreigners ; their fraternity becoming a more popular Philistine scoffing-stock than had been the mildly-ridiculed Connoisseur. Its challenge was more widely affronting to countless parlours. Morris himself declared that anyone who had not been " con- noisseured out of his senses "- was naturally aesthetic. Morris, however, was half a " Celt," and his hybridism made his Celtic endowment acutely self-conscious and antipathetically savage against the beef-wittedness of his other kin.
The perception of art is sensational, not intellectual or rational, however dogmatic a system of canons of beauty critical and reflective intelligence may ingeniously for- mulate. Morris, if anyone, could have propounded such formulas, but Morris, when discussing old manuscripts in his study at Kelmscott House, merely told us, " I always know when a thing is really good, by its making me feel warm across here,"—rubbing with both hands that part of his waistcoat that covered the seat of his. dia- phragm. But unless a like movement of feeling has prompted and guided the artist or workman in his own intuitii-c handling of his materials the product will not be Art nor produce the impresSion of beauty. If it has been so prompted it will be undeniable art in the teeth of all classical catkins.
Morris, having received his most stimulating clue from Ruskin's chapter " The Nature of Gothic," and having unproved on Ruskin's formulation of it—broadening it from the insistence that Art must copy Nature to the perception that art is actually the expression of Nature through the temperament of a human produCer—was able to amplify and give profounder significance than even Ruskin did to the relevance of this clue to the ghastly scene of modern commercial and industrial society. It became obvious why it was that capitalist civilization should have been making the whole world hideous. First, the mechanization of industry, within the scope of the functioning of the machine, simply gutted pro- duction of all vital ingredient whatever—substituting, for flesh, potted meat ; and, secondly, the capitalist purpose of profit-making superseding the purpose of production for use, combined with the transformation of the free master-craftsman or cultivator into an employee at wages, had converted the workers into undifferentiated batches of " labour force," making they know not what for they know not whom, and knowing not why they make it except that by " working " they earn precariously a weekly dole of cash to feed themselves, and for their employer's rent, interest and profits.
Morris' name is familiar chiefly in connexion. with Art and craftsmanship, with the workmanship of men's. hands, with productions, therefore, commonly, with ominous significance, called " artificial," or regarded perhaps as creations of Humanism rather than Nature. But his own most profound and insistently-emphasized faith and conviction were that all work and production permissibly describable as Art, all beauty in the achieve- ments of Man, are manifestations in Man of the vital force and influence of the Earth and Nature—" the earth, and the seasons, and weather . . . and all that grows out of it ; as this " (the North Oxfordshire building he loved) " has done.. . . The earth, and the growth of it, and the life of it ; . . . If I could but say or show how I love it ! "
As to the blight of capitalism and wage7slavery- " I must say," he told the Burslem Potters in 1881, "-my imagination will stretch no further than to suggest rebellion in general as a remedy." To that conviction he held, and devoted unsparing energy to the preaching of Socialism. Meanwhile; however, and first of all, " the cleaning of England." The natural beauty of England Must be rescued, preserved and restored ; what remained of her authentic architeetuie and. art saved from destruction—as that of Burford Church from the vagaries of that astonishing vicar who concluded his battle with Morris with the triumphant crow—" The Church, sir ! is mine : and if I choose to I shall stand on niy head in it." Had Morris been Henry II, the brains of that " arrogant priest " would no doubt have besprent the encaustic tiles he had substituted for the Shilstone pavement (including the gravestone of Speaker Lenthall).
Not that Morris, any more than his most absorbent disciple, Bernard Shaw,. considered that a parasitic dilettante society that can create no beauty itself ha-: any right to whimper over the destruction of beautiful things produced under conditions which it. has itself destroyed, while it obstinately strives to maurtaiii the system that has destroyed them. But, for the sake of educational contrast, and because, if anyone is to make beautiful things he must live in a beautiful place, what can be saved must be fought for (as, indeed, it is being fought for, largely thanks to Morris, today).
Next, he demanded " Education on all sides "- if only because " knowledge means aspiration or discon- tent—call it what you will." He was an aesthete ; but he did not desire the revival of art for the sake of making life more agreeable for cultured people. He wanted it as the evidence of a liberation of the producer from servitude to the machine and the balance-sheet, and of his doing his job because he enjoyed the technics of it and because he wished it to serve and give joy to the men and women that were to use it. Only thus could he have pleasure in his own work and himself appreciate art, knowing himself what it was.
There must be authentic, original vital activity of the worker in producing his work, or it can have no beauty—beauty being the message of living feeling between the living. Style is conveyed through the hand, the voice, the ear, in writing. Standing alongside Morris' broad blue shoulder, on the platform of the long, ill- lighted lecture-shed at his Hammersmith house, I used to realize, as he elaborated the intricate pattern of one of those superb Aes or Esses that herald, as with a sudden brunt of harmonious brass, the pleasant melodies of his pages—why he wanted the written word to be beautiful in the type as the uttered sentences in the ear. Art flowed out of him as he sat with his ruddy neck and big grizzled poll bent forward beside the lamp on the chairman's table.
I had been speaking on .Zola, and we. were discussing realism in fiction. In the far gloom of. the tunnel-hall a slender, dusky figure uplifted a spectral visage, hung with raven locks. It swayed, unfurled black wings of an immense bardic cloak, and, swaying, wailed like a Banshee against Realism and in praise of Romance. But Morris took Zola's part against Yeats' protest : for, he said— he is perfectly right : a great part of our people are like that : it has to be recognized. But as he said at Burslem after speaking of hooliganism : . . . " Do not think, I beg you, that I am speaking rhetorically in saying that when I think of all this, I feel that the one great thing I desire is that this great country should . . . turn that mighty force of her respectable people, the greatest power the world has ever seen, to giving the children of these poor folk the pleasures and the hopes of men. Is that really impossible ? Is there no hope of it ? If so, I can only say that civilization is a delusion and a lie ; there is no such thing and no hope of such a thing."
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