William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement/1
William Morris
From a Photograph by Fredk. Hollyer.
WILLIAM MORRIS
AND THE EARLY DAYS OF THE
SOCIALIST MOVEMENT
CHAPTER I
introduction
Think of the joy we have in praising great men, and how we turn their stories over and over, and fashion their lives for our joy; and this also we ourselves may give to the world.—William Morris. (Mackail's Life, i. 334.)
William Morris was to my mind one of the greatest men of genius this or any other land has ever known. In abundance of creative energy and fullness of skill in arts and letters it is doubtful if he has ever been excelled. Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Albrecht Dürer, and the builders of the great medieval cathedrals, are among the few master-craftsmen that rank on an equal plane with him in respect of the eminence and variety of his gifts. This appraisement may perhaps appear an exaggerated one to those who are accustomed to regard painting and sculpture as the highest, if not the only great, arts; for Morris did not devote himself to painting and sculpture, though as a matter of fact he could, and in his earlier days did, paint admirably. But to those, and happily they are now many, who have a better understanding of art, and who see in the industrial and decorative handicrafts scope for the highest and most delightful exercise of the imagination and skill of eye and hand, the statement will hardly appear an extravagant one.
It was, I think, the late Theodore Watts-Dunton who said of Morris that he had accomplished in his life the work of at least six men of front-rank literary and artistic capacity. This is not mere eulogy. No question has ever been raised in Morris' case as to whether he was or was not a true poet or a great master of his art. The genuineness in quality no less than the remarkable range of his accomplishments is acknowledged by all competent judges.
As a poet he ranks in the great modern constellation with Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Browning, and Tennyson. As a prose writer, especially of pure romance, he holds a place of his own. He was the supreme craftsman of his age. In the arts of the design and manufacture of furniture, wall decoration, stained glass, book illumination, and book-printing he created a new tradition. He rescued these arts from the degradation of mere commercialism, revived the best observances of old craftsmanship, and pioneered the new. In various other crafts—arras tapestry, weaving, and wood-engraving, for example—he attained notable proficiency. Nor was he, as many men of creative faculty frequently are, careless and incompetent in regard to the ordinary affairs, occupations, and amusements of life. He took a keen interest and displayed an expert hand in many of the often despised tasks of the household, as well as in outdoor employments and recreations. He had a good understanding of all country matters, and was an angler, oarsman, and swimmer. He was a first-rate cook, and never was more happy than when, on a house-boat excursion, he was installed in the cooking galley or the kitchen, amidst pots and pans, cooking meals of his own choice for his friends. He used to say half-jestingly that he could bake bread and brew ale with any farmer's wife in Oxfordshire. His knowledge of birds, Mr. Mackail tells us, was extraordinary; and he was continually surprising his friends with an unexpected acquaintance with modern science and industrial processes which he sometimes affected to despise. Unlike many of his literary and artistic friends, he took an eager and indeed an absorbing interest in politics and all matters relating to the public welfare; and he was, as we know, one of the most ardent propagandists and unflinching agitators of his day.
Morris was not only great as a man of genius and of general attainments; he was great in the high manliness and in the amplitude and richness of his nature. The impression of strength, of self-sufficiency, of action, of great individuality in him was felt by everyone in his presence. Among his immediate friends, many of them men of remarkable attainments, such as Burne-Jones, Philip Webb, Rossetti, Swinburne, and De Morgan, he was acknowledged the most masterful personality of them all. He occasionally showed a towering temper, but it was wholly without malice, and seemed given him merely by way of emblasonry. He was singularly unaffected, companionable, and good-humoured. There was not a particle of acidity or bitterness in him. He was simply incapable of cruelty or any act of meanness or oppression, of lying or pretence. And while one of the hardest-working, and in some respects most seriously minded men of his age, he was also full of jollity and boyishness, delighting in fun and merry-making, in games and story-telling, and in outings with friends. Limitations and even positive defects of character he had—they were conspicuous enough. But these notwithstanding, he had in him such an unusual combination of noble and delightful qualities, that he stands out as one of the grandest and most attractive personalities of our time.
And forth from his genius and character there sprang as a great flower his art, wherein was made manifest the word and teaching which, alike by precept and by the example of his life, he gave to the world. He taught us as no one ever before the lesson that art was the greatest expression of joy in work and life, and the highest evidence (as I will put it) of man's likeness to, and his worship of, his Creator. In the intensity of this conviction, no less than in the splendour of his example, concerning the high importance of art as a fundamental test of man's real freedom, of democracy, and of civilisation itself, Morris stands out unique among the greatest teachers of the modern world.
Lastly, and inevitably, Morris was a Socialist. He was a Socialist because he could not be William Morris without being a Socialist. His Socialism was not, as some of his admirers have supposed, an incidental occurrence in his life a sort of by-product of his career; it was integral with his genius; it was born and bred in his flesh and bone. He derived his Socialist impulse from no theory or philosophy or reasoning of his intellect, but from his very being. Under no circumstances of life could he ever have been happy in making his fellow-man a slave, or in deriving advantage from his fellows' pain or misery; nor could he have done so at all without being conscious of doing it, for the very nature of him would have perceived the fact through whatever conventions might obscure it. It was simply impossible for him to accept from others any service or gift which he himself was not ready in his heart to give to others even more abundantly if he could.
Fellowship, he said, is life, and lack of fellowship is death; and in saying this he was expressing not a mere judgment of his mind, but what he felt within himself and what he expressed in his art and whole conduct of life.
All these things about Morris I did not, of course, know when I first met him and fixed my youthful homage upon him: indeed, it was not until after his death that the greater qualities of his character and achievement revealed themselves to me. But I felt from my first acquaintance with him, as did so many others, that he was greater than his fame, or than even his remarkable personality betokened him to be.
It was something, then, even to know such a man. It was much not only to know him, but to be privileged to enjoy his friendship. That I was among those fortunate enough to gain that boon, I reckon as one of the greatest rewards of my Socialist apostleship, and as part of the good fortune of my life. It has not only coloured my Socialist ideals and hopes, but has tinged with a glow of romance the memory of all my after days.
True, my acquaintance with him was in actual quantity of intimacy very small, though it covered a period of over ten years—from 1884 till the time of his death. Even at that I only met him some three or four times a year, either while he was visiting Scotland on a Socialist lecturing tour, or when I was visiting him at his house in Hammersmith, and on each occasion only for a day or two. But during these visits I was brought closely in touch with him, and was so eagerly interested in all he said and did, and all things concerning him, that I gained the utmost from these personal experiences. Besides, he corresponded frequently with me, writing always to me most frankly concerning himself and the affairs of the Socialist movement.
Alike, therefore, because of the interest which is generally felt in the personal characteristics of a man of such great attainments as Morris, and because of the interest and importance which his work in the Socialist movement has for so many of the younger generation of Socialists, I propose to set down in these pages some of my recollections of him.
Often during the past twenty years I have been eagerly asked about him, when I have been sitting with comrades round the fire after addressing Socialist meetings, and on such occasions I have always been implored to write down my reminiscences of him. That, however, I have hitherto shrunk from doing, partly because I have felt so much reverence for the memory of the man that I have been loth to risk writing about him, lest in so doing I should unwittingly deface in any way the true image of him; and partly because I have hitherto been too much absorbed in my every-day work to afford the leisure for the task—little as it may seem. But now, confined as I am to bed, and with only, as it would seem, a few more months at most in which to write or to do anything more in this realm of life, I feel a longing which I cannot allay to leave some of the treasures of my memories of him as a legacy to the Socialist movement.
And should anyone object to the number of these chapters, and to the minuteness of the details recorded in some of them, I can only plead that to myself and, I hope, to many Socialists at least all that concerns a true appreciation of Morris' character, and the circumstances of his propaganda career, are as interesting and important as anything that can be recorded of any notable thinker and worker in modern history.
It may be asked whether, in recording Morris' conversations, I have relied upon notes taken at the time, or solely upon my memory. I have done neither. Fortunately I have preserved diary notes covering several years of our acquaintance, in which there are brief jottings concerning him. These have enabled me to check dates of meetings and some other details. As for my memory, it is one of the poorest so far as concerns retaining in the ordinary way a recollection of words or phrases, but it is usually exceedingly retentive of visual or pictorial impressions. During the past twenty or thirty years I have often, as I have said, had occasion when talking over early times with friends to recall many of the incidents recorded here, and have rarely found any difficulty in bringing back a vivid recollection of the scenes, but have usually had to content myself with giving the barest indication of the conversations. How then am I to account for being able to set down, as I have done in many instances, what I give as the actual words used by him?
It is right that I should explain this matter, so that my readers may judge how far they may place reliance on my narrative.
I do not know whether my experience in this matter is at all a common one with writers of reminiscences, but I have found that my memory is, on many occasions, subject to what seems to be a sort of 'illumination' or 'inspiration.' Thus, when I have fixed my mind on one, say, of the incidents recalled in these chapters, the scene has begun to unfold itself—perhaps slowly at first, but afterwards rapidly and clearly. Meditating upon it for a time, I have lifted my pen and begun to write. Then, to my surprise, the conversations, long buried or hidden somewhere in my memory, have come back to me, sometimes in the greatest fullness—word for word, as we say. Nay, not only the bare words, but the tones, the pauses, and the gestures of the speaker. The whole scene, in fact, with all that was at the time visible to (or at least noted by) the eye, and all that was heard or noted by the ear, has returned and rehearsed or repeated itself in my mind. Or, to put the experience in another and perhaps as true a way, my mind has been taken back—winged imaginatively across the gulf of years—to the actual occurrence, and I have seen and heard once more what I then saw and heard.
In writing, for example, the account given in the chapter 'A Red-Letter Day,' of our meeting on the cinder-heap, I was taken back, so to speak, to that Saturday afternoon thirty-two years ago, and lived over again its minutes and hours. I sat again with Morris in the train; I listened to the inebriated house-carpenter's chatter; I turned away shamefaced on the station platform, while Morris fulminated against the unlucky railway guard. I stood by the cinder-heap and listened to Morris give his address, hearing his voice and observing his mannerisms, watching the faces and hearing the occasional remarks of the audience, and noting the dreary surroundings of dismal buildings and bristling chimney stalks—I passed again, I say, through all this experience, the scenes all re-enacting themselves over again, as vividly (so at least it seemed to me) as when they occurred.
Not, of course, in every instance has the resurrection of the incidents or conversations been equally full and distinct. In some cases I have had difficulty in calling up a complete replica of the scenes and in recollecting the spoken words, and so have given the spirit rather than the letter of his remarks. But, so far as I am aware, I have set down nothing in these pages that is not true in circumstance and substance, if not in every instance in precise delineation and phrase, of what actually occurred.
In this way, then, have these recollections been written, and the reader must judge for himself what trust he can place in the accuracy of the record.
On looking over again what I have written, I discover that I have brought myself a good deal into my narrative. My intention was wholly otherwise. Indeed, my first idea was to write in the third person throughout, and avoid any reference to myself other than such as cropped up incidentally. But when I tried to write in that fashion, the light failed me altogether; I could see nothing clearly, and the whole thing seemed destitute of reality and life. I had no alternative, therefore, but to write as the recollections flashed into my mind, or not at all. I must bear cheerfully, therefore, whatever rebuke my egotism—seeming or real—brings upon me, as ordained by my task.
All that is contained in these pages, as I have said, has been written lying on a bed of pain, with no expectation that I shall ever again walk out amongst my fellows. Rather is my mind set upon the new and strange journey that is dimly before me. And notwithstanding long years of agnostic belief I cannot rid myself of the surmise, the hope, the wonder—call it what you will—that any hour or day I shall find myself in the 'abode where the eternal are,' and shall again meet my splendid comrade face to face. Nay, strange as the thought may appear, I have in a sort of half-dream imagined myself going, while yet some filaments of my present earthly vesture cling to me, to greet him gladly, and placing this book of mine in his hand, without any misgiving lest he should find in it aught that is untrue concerning him, or that might bring a shadow of frown on his brow, or make me shrink from his eyes. And if I can say this in all sincerity, as I do, what else need I say? What else but repeat his own memorable words: 'Think of the joy we have in praising great men, and how we turn their stories over and over, and fashion their lives for our joy; and this also we ourselves may give to the world.'