I THINK that future times will look back upon William Morris as one of the finest figures of this century. In the midst of an era of finesse, sleekness, commercial dodgery, their eyes will rest with relief upon this brusque, hearty, bold, and manly form.
It is not so much, perhaps, in the special immortality of any of his works that his greatness will lie, as ( what is more) in the man himself. For, after all, Life is greater than Art; and the greatest of all artworks is the genuine expression of his own true heart which a man finds and forges for himself out of the materials of the time into which he is born. Morris stood up from the first against the current of ugly, dirty commercialism in which his lot was cast like a man in the midst of a stream fighting against the stream, like a captain in the rout of his men withstanding the torrent of their flight and turning them back to the battle.
He hated with a good loyal hatred all insincerity; but most he hated, and with his very soul, the ugliness and meanness of modern life. I believe that was the great inspiring hatred of his life.
Everyone has remarked the contrast between the man himself—energetic, stormy, a veritable Viking and seacaptain—and his poetry, so languid, so dreamy, so dainty of expression. Perhaps, as he himself seems to have said, he was several personalities rolled into one; but it is not difficult, I think, to see how the peculiar note of his literary work was given by the fact that it was written largely as a relief from his surroundings. After spending his days in organising a large business, with all its irritating commercial details; after enduring polite imprisonment in the mansion of some lordling who required his esthetic advice; after shouting himself hoarse at a street corner; after battling with the police in Trafalgar Square; or after suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous vulgarity in all the sights and sounds of daily life; it was an intense relief, a real holiday, to him to sit down at night and dream himself back perhaps into the fourteenth century, or forward into the reflective image of it in years to come. I believe that the main part of Morris's literary work such books as "News from Nowhere," "The Roots of the Mountains," "A Dream of John Ball," "The Earthly Paradise" came In this way, were written simply for his own recreation, and as an escape from actual conditions; and perhaps it is this which gives them their almost sluggish sense of quietude and beauty, as of a stream which, having fretted itself in its fierce descent among the reeks, meanders at length and at large among the iris-fringed meadows. His speeches, indeed, were a trump of battle, but his imaginative writings moved in the calm of dreamland.
And it is very characteristic of Morris that his chief recreation was only another kind of work. He could not understand that form of pleasure which consists in loafing your days away at a watering-place. A touch of gout in his constitution is the key to much of his character—his irritable, restless energy, his immense power of work, his sudden blazes of temper, his downrightness, sincerity, and hatred of all meanness. When ill, he was a difficult patient to keep in bed. At meals even it would happen that he could not sit still, but, jumping up from the table and talking vehemently, would quarterdeck the room.
One of the last times that I heard him speak in public was in 1889, at the Paris Socialist Congress. After the glib oratorical periods of Jules Guesde and others, what a contrast to see Morris in navy-blue pilot suit—fighting furiously there on the platform with hie own words (he was not feeling well that day), hacking and hewing the stubborn English phrases out—his tangled grey mane tossing, his features reddening with the effort! But the effect was remarkable. Something in the solid English way of looking at things, the common-sense and practical outlook on the world, the earnestness and tenacity, as of a skipper beating up against wind and wave on the great deep, made that speech one of the most effective in the session.
There is no doubt that in the early days of the Socialist League, Morris had a hope, and a strong hope, that the little branches of the League, spreading and growing over the land, would before long reach hands to each other and form a network of free communal life over the whole country. That dream was not realised; but the impulse of growth which he gave has nevertheless been one of the most potent, most generous and humanly beautiful, of all the many impulses which have gone to make up that very complex and far-reaching movement which we call by the name of modern Socialism.
Now to think that he has gone from among us brings a strange tightening and pressure of the affections. To hundreds and thousands of unknown toilers and workers by land and sea, and all over the earth, he was and is the object of a real love; and it is at least some poor consolation that, if in the old form we miss him, still in the hearts of men and women thus multiplied his image moves and lives, and will live.
William Morris
Edward Carpenter
Freedom, December 1896
Repinted in: Labour Leader, 19th December 1896
Graham Seaman, September 2020.