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From International Socialist Review, Vol.23 No.4, Fall 1962, pp.120-121.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary
by E.P. Thompson
New York: Monthly Review Press; 1962. 908 pp. $8.50.
This is a big, awkward book, much like Morris himself, as Shaw put it, “in a drawing room,” but as effective in the over-all result as Morris proved to be in his over-all greatness.
The author, a Staff Tutor at Leeds University, uses the panoramic style. While this technique accurately recreates the world of William Morris (the history of everyone of even slight importance connected with Morris and/or Socialism in 19th Century England is included), it can also lead to confusion. There is simply a greater mass of information within these 900 pages than can easily be handled at first reading.
In addition to diffuseness and a bewildering use of allusions, there is an overall structural uneveness. The first part of the book relates Morris’ early life, including his artistic development and the influence of Ruskin. The largest section is composed of a history of Socialism in Victorian England and Morris’ part in it. The final section is a miscellany which includes analyses of several of Morris’ more important works and a consideration of Morris as artist, Marxist, personality, and legend.
In spite of clumsy, even inferior, writing, Thompson nevertheless conveys the tragic greatness of this Socialist prophet. Yet Morris in his thirties had wistfully called himself an “idle singer of an empty day” and went on to ask in his poem, The Earthly Paradise, “Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, / Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?” Born into wealth, a furniture manufacturer all his life, a Socialist only the last fifteen years of his life, William Morris is most famous for this particular poem, his artistic contributions as a youthful Pre-Raphaelite, and his interest in handicraft decoration. Obscured by falsification and legend-building first by the Fabian Socialists and now by the British Labour Party, Morris’ energetic and selfless political activity is misunderstood or neglected. This book does an excellent job in restating and reevaluating Morris, the Socialist. It also tackles the problem of the source of Morris’ undeniable greatness. The author states:
What was the source of the greatness of Morris – this growing stature which he assumes in the perspective of history? His poetry alone, or his work in the decorative arts – profound though its influence was – would hardly be sufficient to establish his claim to the universal greatness suggested by Shaw. As a political organizer his efforts ended in failure. His political theory, important as it is in the English tradition, appears as bold crayon-work beside the firm and fine-drawn analysis of Marx and Engels. As a theorist of the arts – despite all his profound insight – he failed to erect a consistent system, and muddled his way around some central problems. Did he make any major contribution to English culture which is marked by the stamp of unquestionable originality and excellence?
The answer must be, “Yes.” Morris’ claim to greatness must be founded, not on any single contribution to English culture, in one field alone, but on the quality which unites and informs every aspect of his life and work. This quality might best be described as “moral realism”: it is the practical moral insight of his political and artistic writings which gives them life.
As nebulous as “moral realism” might sound, it was undoubtedly the strength and genius of Morris. It impelled him to fight opportunists such as Hyndman and Olympic philanthropists such as the Fabians. It was this honesty that turned him from his initial sectarian position of refusing to support the workers’ activities regarding strikes, unions, and political campaigns, to an authentic Marxist position. He eventually believed that the struggle for and amelioration of workers’ conditions gave the working class confidence and, more important, aroused their imaginations as to what society could and should be. Most notable – and tragic – is that Morris accurately foretold, by way of warning, what would happen if the reformists were able to mislead the working class. In his essay Communism, Morris cautioned:
I want to know and to ask you to consider, how far the betterment of the working people might go and yet stop at last without having made any progress on the direct road to Communism. Whether in short the tremendous organization of civilized commercial society is not playing ihe cat and mouse game with us socialists. Whether the Society of Inequality might not accept ... quasi-socialist machinery ... and work it for the purpose of upholding that society in a somewhat shorn condition, maybe, but a safe one ... The workers better treated, better organized, helping to govern themselves, but with no more pretence to equality with the rich, nor any more hope for it than they have now.
Ironically, Clement Atlee claims Morris for the Labour Party!
Thompson accurately states that “Morris’ claim to importance as a political theorist rests upon two grounds. First, he was one of the earliest, and remains one of the most original and creative thinkers within the Marxist tradition in England. Second, he was a pioneer of constructive thought as to the organization and manifestations of social life within Communist society.” In addition to many essays on the latter subject, Morris also wrote News from Nowhere, a Utopian novel, different from all other Utopian works in that it is a social prophecy based on scientific Marxism. As Morris himself promises at the end of News, “if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.”
The same moral realism that guided Morris to an orthodox Marxist position governed the rest of his life. His integrity as a young man had made him join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in protest at the sham art and over-done artifacts of a Victorian England. Many of the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites, however, were eventually adopted and perverted by the wealthy classes, with the same lack of taste and honesty they showed in their tea-time dabbling in “socialist” ideas.
Morris’ realistic philosophy is also manifested by his concern for the ugliness of the workers’ lives. His firm in Oxford Street provided the workers with not only higher wages and shorter hours than were known for comparative work in all England, but also with clean, colorful, and artistically pleasing surroundings. A constantly repeated idea in all his essays and lectures is that labor must be limited in duration, done in clean and agreeable surroundings, and be meaningful and artistically satisfying to both the worker-creator and the eventual user. Useful Work Versus Useless Toil is an essay that differentiates between labor one is forced to do for profit and labor one willingly does for pleasure.
Finally, Morris’ stature grows with the reiteration of the principle of “hope” in all his socialist writings. His best socialist poem, centering on the Paris Commune, is called The Pilgrims of Hope. This poem, celebrating a short triumph and then terrible defeat for the working class, begins with The Message of the March Wind:
|
... “Rise up on the morrow |
Morris’ last years saw not only reformist-Fabian victories, but also the final disillusion of the “great” 19th Century of Commerce. This disillusion is honestly expressed in the finest literature of the time; e.g., Matthew Arnold’s famous poem Dover Beach that sees the world as a “darkling plain ... where ignorant armies clash by night.” As Thompson writes, “against this tide, Morris alone stood with full assurance, with conscious confidence in life. The rock he stood upon was his Socialist convictions, his scientific understanding of history. The name which he gave to this rock was ‘Hope.’”
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