Complete works of willia.., p.820
Complete Works of William Morris, page 820
“I have now” (August 25th) “committed the irremediable error of finishing the Odyssey, all but a little bit of fair-copying. I am rather sad thereat.”
“It is a beautiful bright autumn morning here, as fresh as daisies: and I am not over-inclined for my morning preachment at Walham Green, but go I must, as also to Victoria Park in the afternoon. I had a sort of dastardly hope that it might rain. Mind you, I don’t pretend to say that I don’t like it in some way or other, when I am on my legs. I fear I am an inveterate word-spinner and not good for much else.”
“I had three very good days at Kelmscott” (in September): “once or twice I had that delightful quickening of perception by which everything gets emphasized and brightened, and the commonest landscape looks lovely; anxieties and worrits, though remembered, yet no weight on one’s spirits — Heaven in short. It comes not very commonly even in one’s younger and brighter days, and doesn’t quite leave one even in the times of combat.”
Late in that autumn was produced the most singular of all Morris’ literary adventures, the little play entitled “The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened.” “I have been writing,” he says on the 24th of September, “a — what? — an ‘interlude’ let’s call it, to be acted at Farringdon Road for the benefit of Commonweal “ It was performed there on the 15th of October, Morris himself acting in it, and was so successful that it was repeated three times. The dramatic form was one which he had essayed long before in a very different material. “Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,” “The Fall of Troy,” and “Love is Enough,” are a trilogy which is strangely concluded by this satyric piece.
In the contemporary theatre and in the modern actor’s art Morris had not, and never affected to have, the slightest interest. From a very different point of view, he had for many years come to the same conclusion as Matthew Arnold in pronouncing the modern English theatre the most debased in Europe. Since the days of his early enthusiasm for Robson and Kean he hardly ever had gone to a play, unless on some rare occasion when he took his children or was dragged off by a friend. Nor has “The Tables Turned” anything that can be called a plot, any dramatic artifice, or any characterization beyond that of a mediæval mystery play. “If he had started a Kelmscott Theatre,” says one of the most enthusiastic and most paradoxical of his followers,”instead of the Kelmscott Press, I am quite confident that in a few months, without going half a mile afield for his company, he would have produced work that would within ten years have affected every theatre in Europe.” As a personal impression this assertion is interesting, but unverifiable. As a matter of fact nothing came of the experiment in which the method of the Townley Mysteries was applied to a modern farce. “Morris was so interested,” the critic just quoted adds, 11 buy his experiment in this sort of composition that he for some time talked of trying his hand at a serious drama, and would no doubt have done it had there been any practical occasion for it, or any means of consummating it by stage representation under proper conditions, without spending more time on the job than it was worth. It was impossible for such a born teller and devourer of stories as he was to be indifferent to an art which is nothing more than the most vivid and real of all ways of storytelling.” It is certainly true that he was just then casting about for some new method of expressing the thought working inside him, and getting rid of his superabundant creative energy. So it had always been in all his practice of the arts: no sooner had he mastered one art — were it illuminating, or carpet-weaving, or narrative poetry — than he passed eagerly on to master another: and just now, “rather lost,” as he says, “with the conclusion of my Odyssey job, and on the look-out for another,” he may have thought now and then of the dramatic form as one in which he might begin a new and interesting series of researches and experiments in order to recover, as in the other arts, the dropped thread of the mediaeval tradition. But if so, it was not seriously, nor for long: and in the series of prose romances which he began soon afterwards, and which were continued through the remaining years of his life, he found a vehicle of new expression more satisfying to his imagination and better suited to his familiar methods.
The part which Morris himself took in the play was that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was supposed to have been called as a witness for the defence in a police prosecution of a member of the Socialist League. The charge was one of obstruction and incitement to riot by speaking from a stool (as Morris so often did) on a Sunday forenoon at Beadon Road, Hammersmith. “Under the pretext of paying a visit to my brother of London,” the Archbishop had got into a cab and gone off to see what these Socialist meetings were like. “To the best of my remembrance,” he states in evidence, “there were present at the commencement of your discourse but three persons exclusive of yourself” — namely, a colleague of the lecture, the Archbishop himself, and a small boy. The discourse “was a mass of the most frightful incendiarism. He even made an attack on my position, stating (wrongly) the amount of my moderate stipend.” The audience, he further states, had increased to ten by the time the orator concluded. The scene, which was received by the audience, most of them familiar with those Sunday street meetings, with uncontrolled amusement, gave the ludicrous side of a bitter truth. Often Morris had himself spoken, both in doors and out of doors, to as small an audience. A few months earlier, a lecture on Feudal England, into which no other man alive could have put an equal combination of historical knowledge, imaginative insight, and romantic sympathy, had been delivered to an audience of nine people, not one of whom probably understood what it was about. That such entire public apathy regarding the Socialist ideal should co-exist with the presence of revolution actually at the door (the trial in this play is broken off by its triumphal outbreak) is a situation well enough suited for a farce which is intentionally and wildly extravagant. But it seems that even then the combination was one in which the more ardent members of the League had not in the least abandoned belief.
For that strange belief, in which Morris no doubt had once to a certain degree shared (“as his way was about everything, to make it something different from what it was,” the habit of boyhood surviving undiminished into mature life), the events of the next month in London gave some sort of colour. A long-continued depression of trade had made the question of the unemployed, in London and elsewhere, more than usually serious; and the restlessness among the working classes culminated in the famous scenes of the 13th of November, “Bloody Sunday,” in and round Trafalgar Square. A meeting in the Square had been announced to protest against the Irish policy of the Government: it had been proclaimed by the police, and became converted into a demonstration on a huge scale. No one who saw it will ever forget the strange and indeed terrible sight of that grey winter day, the vast sombre-coloured crowd, the brief but fierce struggle at the corner of the Strand, and the river of steel and scarlet that moved slowly through the dusky swaying masses when two squadrons of the Life Guards were summoned up from Whitehall. Morris himself did not see it till all was nearly over. He had marched with one of the columns which were to converge on Trafalgar Square from all quarters. It started in good order to the number of five or six thousand from Clerkenwell Green, but at the crossing of Shaftesbury Avenue was attacked in front and on both flanks by a strong force of police. They charged into it with great violence, striking right and left indiscriminately. In a few minutes it was helplessly broken up. Only disorganized fragments straggled into the Square, to find that the other columns had also been headed off or crushed, and that the day was practically over. Preparations had been made to repel something little short of a popular insurrection. An immense police force had been concentrated, and in the afternoon the Square was lined by a battalion of Foot Guards, with fixed bayonets and twenty rounds of ball cartridge. For an hour or two the danger was imminent of street-fighting such as had not been known in London for more than a century. But the organized force at the disposal of the civil authorities proved sufficient to check the insurgent columns and finally clear the streets without a shot being fired. For some weeks afterwards the Square was garrisoned by special drafts of police. Otherwise London next day had resumed its usual aspect.
Once more the London Socialists had drawn into line with the great mass of the London Radicals, and a formidable popular movement had resulted, which on that Sunday was within a very little of culminating in a frightful loss of life and the practical establishment of a state of siege in London. But the English spirit of compromise soon made itself felt. While on the one hand the impotence of a London crowd against armed and drilled forces had been crushingly demonstrated, on the other hand the public were startled into seriousness. Measures were taken for the relief of the unemployed. Political Radicalism resumed its normal occupations; and by the end of the year the Socialist League had dropped back to its old place, a small body of enthusiasts among whom an Anarchist group were now beginning to assume a distinct prominence. The only other important public occasion in which Morris took part during the rest of the year was on the 18th of December. A young man named Alfred Linnell had died in hospital from injuries received from the police in the struggle of Bloody Sunday. A public funeral was organized. In pouring rain a great but orderly crowd marched through the mid-winter dusk from Soho to Bow Cemetery, where the burial service was read by the light of a lantern. The stately verses which Morris wrote for the occasion are well known. Less known, but perhaps not less worthy of remembrance, is the brief speech which he delivered over the grave. The other speakers — Mr. Tims of Battersea, Mr. Dowling of the Irish National League, Mr. Quelch of the Social Democratic Federation — had improved the occasion with obvious sincerity, but in phrases that were rapidly becoming mere commonplaces of journalism and losing any definite meaning: protesting against what they described as the autocracy of the police, speaking of hired murderers in uniform, and a ruling class trembling in its shoes. Morris’ words, spoken to a crowd fast melting away in the darkness and rain, tried to recall the larger and nobler issue. “Our friend who lies here has had a hard life, and met with a hard death; and if society had been differently constituted, his life might have been a delightful, a beautiful, and a happy one. It is our business to begin to organize for the purpose of seeing that such things shall not happen; to try and make this earth a beautiful and happy place.”
“The scene at the grave,” he writes a few days afterwards, “was the strangest sight I have ever seen, I think. It was most impressive to witness; there was to me something aweful (I can use no other word) in such a tremendous mass of people, unorganized, unhelped, and so harmless and good-tempered.”
This feeling of pity for the helplessness of the masses had throughout stood alongside of his indignation at the practical barbarism of the commercial system as the dominant force in his mind. When he saw the multitudes — if we may recall in so different a context the august words of the Evangelist — he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd. The direct result of all his efforts to bring them together and lead them on was indeed little enough. The smallness of the numbers of really convinced supporters, however much the opportunist section of English Socialists might try to swell them out by various bodies of men in buckram, was a fact to which he never blinded himself, nor was he less keenly alive to the prodigious difficulty of accustoming men’s minds in England to conceive the possibility of any changes being effected by other than the familiar Parliamentary methods. “I have always known,” he writes on the 26th of February, 1887, to Ellis, “that if ever there were a Socialist party in England they would have to send men to Parliament, though I certainly wouldn’t be one of them. But ’tis no more use a sect blustering about getting itself represented’ than it is about its conquering the world by dynamite and battle. ’Tis barely possible to get a Radical returned as a Radical, let alone a Socialist. Still things have moved much within the last four years, and they will no more stop for the capitalists than they will hurry for me.” But it was not all waste labour. “Men fight and lose the battle,” says John Ball, “and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant.” The silent permeation of a new spirit was making itself felt. The doctrines on which Socialism is founded were slowly beginning to modify common thought. Education towards revolution, Morris’ own watchword as a Socialist, was in one sense or another rapidly becoming the order of the day. In the larger sphere of politics a change of tone was beginning to be manifest. Significant utterances began to be heard from supporters of the existing organization. The celebrated words, “We are all Socialists now,” had already been uttered by an ex-Minister in the House of Commons. Professed Socialists had been invited to read papers at the Church Congress, and a Bishop had startled his colleagues by publicly declaring the contrast between the rich and poor to be so appalling that serious consideration was due to any scheme, no matter how revolutionary, that promised relief. And about Morris himself a group of artists and craftsmen were gathering, who, without following his principles to their logical issues or joining any Socialist organization, were profoundly permeated with his ideas on their most fruitful side, that of the regeneration, by continued and combined individual effort, of the decaying arts of life. Among these men, a small body, but growing in numbers, strong in youth, ardent in assured conviction, Morris’ final words on the Beauty of Life were at last working with their full force. “To us who have a cause at heart, our highest ambition and our simplest duty are one and the same thing. For the most part we shall be too busy doing the work that lies ready to our hands to let impatience for visibly great progress vex us much. And surely, since we are servants of a cause, hope must be ever with us.”
Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. Such too had been the last word of the despised eighteenth century.
CHAPTER XVIII. SIGNS OF CHANGE: THE ARTS AND CRAFTS: RETURN TO ROMANCE. 1888-1889
THIS group of craftsmen were drawn together from many different quarters and worked in very various methods; but each in his own sphere, all alike consciously aimed at a Renaissance of the decorative arts which should act at once through and towards more humanized conditions of life both for the workman and for those for whom he worked. There were few if any among them who would not readily have acknowledged Morris as their master. The seed sown twenty-seven years before in the little workshop in Red Lion Square had long been silently and unostentatiously bearing fruit. Of those whose practice had long been moulded by Morris’ influence, there were not a few for whom the ideas which underlay the whole of his work had, when they took definite shape as a body of doctrine, added a quickened impulse and a higher enthusiasm. Socialism, less as a definite creed or a dogmatic system than as a way of looking at human life and the meaning of the arts, was widely diffused among a younger generation of artists. Among these Mr. Walter Crane, by his versatility and energy, as well as the acknowledged excellence of his artistic work, held a leading place. Mr. T. J. Cobden-Sanderson brought to the movement an energy as great, united with the gift of a copious and persuasive eloquence. Among the younger men Mr. Heywood Sumner, Mr. W. R. Lethaby, and Mr. W. A. S. Benson may be singled out as prominent members of the group. Only a few out of the whole body were, either then or subsequently, professed Socialists. Some of them were Conservative or even ultra-Conservative in politics. But they all in their special lines of work carried out ideas of which Morris was the original source. To them, and to many others, he has been, both while he lived and afterwards, an inspiring and guiding influence of the first importance.
Alongside of this movement, or rather essentially included in it, was another movement towards a re-integration of labour, a practical socialism of handicraft as applied to the arts. This movement expressed itself in two ways. On the one hand it aimed at a new organization of work within the single workshop, so that the manager, the designer, and the artificer should cease to be three distinct persons belonging to different social grades, differently educated and differently employed, working without mutual sympathy, or even each in active hostility to the others. On the other hand it expressed itself in the coordination of these workshops, hitherto isolated units of productive energy, whether by means of formal guilds and associations, or through more intangible links of common ideas and kindred enthusiasms, into the beginnings of a trained organism of handicraftsmen, with a mutual intercommunication, and a cumulative force of trained intelligence. What Morris himself had, in earlier days, done by the mere unassisted force of his own genius, was now being attempted on all sides with a conscious purpose. His own work in the early sixties had been based on two principles: the first, that nothing should be done in his workshops which he did not know how to do himself; and the second, that every form of decorative art could be subsumed under the single head of architecture, and had only a real life and intelligible meaning in its relation to the mistress-art, and through the mistress-art to all the other subordinate arts. Following out these principles, his pupils were now occupied, first, in learning what it was they had to deal with by actual work at the lathe, or the dye-vat, or the mason’s yard, and then in forming, by the coordination and communication of this practical knowledge, the basis for a really popular art such as had not existed within the memory of men now living.
