William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement/15
CHAPTER XV
HIS SOCIALISM: FELLOWSHIP AND WORK
IN an earlier chapter I recalled how Morris, when he first met us in Gla gow, had flatly declared his indifference to Marx's theory of value, or any other dogmas of political economy. Yet in an interview published a year or two later in Cassell's Saturday Magazine, Morris was reported to have said that he had been led towards Socialism by Ruskin's teaching and his own artistic feeling, but that it was the reading of Marx's 'Capital' that had finally made him a convinced Socialist. This statement rather surprised me, and on visiting him shortly afterwards in London I referred to the article, and asked him if it was true that Marx had influenced in an important way his Socialist ideas.
'I don't think the Cassell's Magazine chap quite put it as I gave it him,' Morris replied; 'but it is quite true that I put some emphasis on Marx—more than I ought to have done, perhaps. The fact is that I have often tried to read the old German Israelite, but have never been able to make head or tail of his algebraics. He is stiffer reading than some of Browning's poetry. But you see most people think I am a Socialist because I am a crazy sort of artist and poet chap, and I mentioned Marx because I wanted to be upsides with them and make believe that I am really a tremendous Political Economist—which, thank God, I am not! I don't think I ever read a book on Political Economy in my life—barring, if you choose to call it such, Ruskin's "Unto This Last"—and I'll take precious good care I never will!'
This strong disclaimer, though it smacks of that droll exaggeration in which Morris in a whimsical way sometimes indulged, expresses nevertheless the essential truth respecting his Socialist persuasion. Morris was a Socialist by reason of his whole intellectual and moral construction, and whatever circumstances eventually led him to realise and to proclaim himself a Socialist—and there were doubtless many—his Socialism was none the less a necessary expression of his whole nature.
His Socialism was of the Communist type, and he himself belonged to the old Utopian school rather than to the modern Scientific Socialist school of thought. It is true that occasionally he used distinctively Marxist phrases in his lectures, and so gave the impression that he accepted in the main the Scientific Socialist position. This was notably the case in that most unsatisfactory series of chapters, 'Socialism, from the Root Up,' which he wrote for the Commonweal in 1886-88 jointly with Belfort Bax, or rather, which, as he himself said, Bax wrote and he said ditto to. They were afterwards republished in book-form under the title, 'Socialism: its Growth and Outcome.' But no one who knew him personally, or was familiar with the general body of his writings, could fail to perceive that these Marxist ideas did not really belong to his own sphere of Socialist thought, but were adopted by him because of their almost universal acceptance by his fellow Socialists, and because he did not feel disposed to bother about doctrines which, whether true or false, hardly interested him. One perceives, especially in the case of 'Socialism, from the Root Up,' that dogmatism about the evolution of the family or the logical sequence of economic changes does not come within the range of Morris' line of Socialist vision. This he as good as acknowledged once when he said, alluding playfully to Bax's visits while they were writing the book together, 'I am going to undergo compulsory Baxination again to-day.'
His general conception of Socialism was formed in his mind before he came into touch with the Socialist movement, or with Socialists at all. In his Art lectures, delivered as early as 1878, we find passages in which the essentials of his after-teaching of Socialism are clearly set forth.
In saying that Morris' Socialism was Utopian rather than Scientific, I mean that his Socialism was not derived from any logical inferences from economic analyses of industrial history, but from his whole conception of life. He did not concern himself so much with the science of wealth, or rather money-making, as with the art of living. While ordaining absolute equality of wealth conditions for all as essential to the realisation of the Co-operative Commonwealth, he regarded all readjustments of economic conditions as a means to an end rather than as ends in themselves. The great object of Socialism was to place all men and women on a footing of equality and brotherhood in order that they might one and all have the utmost possible freedom to live the fullest and happiest lives. The selfish striving for gain, the fettering of one's fellow-men in order to benefit by their oppression or misfortune, the ambition for personal superiority or privilege of any kind, were motives wholly abhorrent to his nature.
He did not regard mere quantity of riches or wealth as being important objects of Socialism. Though in no degree favouring asceticism or parsimony of living, he nevertheless believed that in the main the greater the simplicity of our mode of living, the greater would be the happiness and the nobler the achievements of our lives. This idea is expressed in all his descriptions of what he pictured as ideal conditions of fellowship and work—as, for example, in his song 'The Day is Coming,' in his lectures on 'Useful Work versus Useless Toil,' and 'How we live, and how we might live,' and in his 'John Ball' and 'News from Nowhere.'
So much indeed was he out of sympathy with all mere stuffing of life with furniture, so to speak, with all elaboration of devices for cramming life with luxuries and excitements, that he avowed with the utmost sincerity his preference for the humblest sort of cottage life to that of the millionaire splendour of Park Lane or of the most desirable mansions of Villadom. Referring to his visit, in 1884, to Edward Carpenter's little farm at Millthorpe, he wrote: 'I went to Chesterfield and saw Edward Carpenter on Monday, and found him sensible and sympathetic at the same time. I listened with longing heart to his account of his patch of ground, seven acres: He says that he and his fellow can almost live on it: they grow their own wheat and send flowers and fruit to Chesterfield and Sheffield markets: all sounds very agreeable to me. It seems to me that a very real way to enjoy life is to accept all its necessary ordinary details and turn them into pleasures by taking interest in them: whereas modern civilisation huddles them out of the way, has them done in a venal and slovenly manner till they become real drudgery which people can't help trying to avoid. Whiles I think, as a vision, of a decent community as a refuge from our mean squabbles and corrupt society; but I am too old now, even if it were not dastardly to desert.'
Nor was his repulsion from luxury, extravagance, and superfluity of material wealth, and his longing for downrightly simple and even arduous conditions of life a merely occasional or passing frame of mind. Again and again in his discourses on Art and Labour does he affirm his belief that the farther we go from the cottage and the nearer to the palace, the farther we banish ourselves from the sweetest and noblest joys of life. 'Art was not born in the palace, rather she fell sick there,' he said in one of his earliest addresses, and unceasingly in his Art lectures he appealed against the whole plutocratic conception of life. Here are a few sentences culled at random from his lectures in which he puts his plea for simplicity of life into almost axiomatic phrase:
'That which alone can produce popular art among us is living a simple life. Once more I say that the great foe of art (and life) is luxury.'
'Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.'
'Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement. A sanded floor and white-washed walls, and the green trees and flowering meads and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the smoke with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined and the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings?'
'There are two virtues much needed in modern life if it is ever to become sweet, and I am quite sure they are absolutely necessary in sowing the seed of an art which is to be made by the people, as a happiness to the maker and user. These are honesty and simplicity of life.' ('The Art of the People.')
'I have never been in a rich man's house which would not have looked better for having a bonfire made outside of it of nine-tenths of all it held.' (Ibid.)
'Luxury cannot exist without slavery of some kind or other, and its abolition would be blessed, like the abolition of other slaveries, by the freeing of both the slaves and their masters.' (Ibid.)
Perhaps the most distinctive as well as the most prophetic part of his teaching was his exaltation of work. No other writer, ancient or modern, that I know of, has so glorified work for its own sake. If ever man can be said to have believed in work as the greatest human pleasure and as the highest form of worship, it was he. In this respect his teaching stands out almost as uniquely from the teaching in prevalent Socialist literature as from that of literature generally. Both Carlyle and Ruskin had, it is true, proclaimed the nobility of work; but there was in their axioms a preceptorial and disciplinary note. Work with them has still something of the Old Testament penitential curse upon it. With Morris there is no such detraction. Ever and ever again he dwells upon the idea that work is the greatest boon of life, not simply because work is necessary for the sustenance of life—what is necessary may yet be painful and irksome—but because it is in itself a good and joyous thing; because it is the chief means whereby man can express his creative powers, and give to his fellows the gifts of his affection and diligence.
Underneath much of the prevalent teaching of Socialism, especially that of Marxist propagandists, as in the teaching of the Book of Genesis, there lurks the notion that work is from its very nature an oppressive and hateful obligation, to be borne at least as a burden, as a price to be paid for the privilege of life. One feels when reading many of the leading expositions of Socialism that we should want, were such a thing possible, to free the workers not only from the present conditions of work, but from work altogether. In other words, there clings to Socialist teaching the idea—the Capitalist idea, it might be called—that work is in its nature a servitude and oppression, and that the ideal of complete social emancipation would be that we should all be able to live without work—live, that is to say, as 'ladies and gentlemen' without having to do any work at all!
So far from regarding work in that light, so far from looking upon work as being in itself an evil, an undesirable or penitential task, Morris held work to be the highest, the most God-like of all human capacities. Without work life would cease to have any meaning or yield any noble happiness at all. Hear him:
'The hope of pleasure in work itself: how strange that hope must seem to some of my readers—to most of them! Yet I think to all living things there is a pleasure in the exercise of their energies and that even the beasts rejoice in being lithe and swift and strong. But a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works. Not only his own thoughts, but the thoughts of past ages guide his hand, and as part of the human race, he creates. If we work thus we shall be men, and our days in the world will be happy and eventful.'
And again, writing in the Commonweal on Bellamy's 'Looking Backward,' he says: 'Mr. Bellamy worries himself unnecessarily in seeking, with obvious failure, some incentive to labour to replace the fear of starvation which at present is the only one; whereas it cannot be too often repeated that the true incentive to useful and happy labour is, and must be, pleasure in the work itself.'
That single sentence, as Mr. Mackail rightly observes, contains the essence of all his belief in politics, in economics, in art. I doubt if he ever delivered a lecture without reaffirming it as a cardinal principle of his Socialist faith. It might indeed be said that it was from his perception of the direful blight which the degradation of labour has upon the whole tree of life, and his abounding hope in the regeneration of life, which the uplifting of labour to its true dignity and delight would bring, that all his Socialist aspirations sprang. Thus in 1879, several years before he saw his way into the path of Socialist agitation, we find him declaring in an address on 'The Art of the People' to the Birmingham Art students: 'If a man has work to do which he despises, which does not satisfy his natural and rightful desire for pleasure, the greater part of his life must pass unhappily and without self-respect. Consider, I beg of you, what that means, and what ruin must come of it in the end.... The chief duty of the civilised world to-day is to set about making labour happy for all, and to do its utmost to minimise unhappy labour.'
We also find him in what was almost his last Socialist testament, 'News from Nowhere,' giving final emphasis to this principle. My readers will know how in that Utopian romance he makes old Hammond reply to his visitor from the nineteenth century, who expresses astonishment that the people in the new epoch of Rest work without special reward for their labour:
'No reward of labour!' exclaimed Hammond. 'The reward of labour is life. Is that not enough? The reward of creation. The wages which God gets, as people might have said long time agone. If you are going to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is what excellence in work means, the next thing we shall hear of will be a bill sent for the creation of children.'
But the visitor objects that in the nineteenth century it would have been said that there is a natural desire towards the procreation of children, and a natural desire not to work. Whereupon Hammond scouts that as an ancient platitude, and wholly untrue, and explains that in the Communist Commonwealth 'all work is now made pleasurable either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes pleasurable excitement, even when the work is not pleasant; or else because it has grown into a pleasurable habit, as is the case with what you call mechanical work; and lastly (and most of the work is of this kind) because there is a conscious sensuous pleasure in work itself; it is done, that is, by artists.'
And this exaltation of work from being, as in the old world, a servitude and an irksome toil, into a pleasurable creation and art, Morris speaks of as being a far greater and more important change than all the other changes concerning crime, politics, property, and marriage which Socialism will achieve.
He was not, as is commonly thought, opposed to the use of machinery or labour-saving inventions. On the contrary, he strongly urged that all merely laborious and monotonous work should, as far as possible, be done by machinery.[1] He even denied that machinery was necessarily distasteful from an Art point of view. 'It is,' he said, 'the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays.' But he did not in the least rejoice at the prospect of supplanting generally the energies of the mind and the skill of the hands by universal ingenuities of mechanism. That way led, he felt, to the eventual decay, not only of our physical faculties, but of our imagination and our moral powers. For this reason the conception of Socialism and life given in Bellamy's 'Looking Backward' filled him with horror. He was not blind to the many merits of that book—the admirable desire to solve practical problems of wealth distribution, and the wonderful fertility of its suggestions for ensuring social justice and equality all round. But he simply could not abide the notion that the object of Socialism was not only to get rid of the present inequalities of work and reward, but to get rid as far as possible of any occasion for work and exertion altogether, and thereby to reduce life so far as possible to a passive experience of sensory and intellectual excitement.
It was in protest against Bellamy's 'Looking Backward' with its notion of making civilisation a mere emporium of artificial contrivances, and life a cram of sensuous experiences, that he wrote his 'News from Nowhere.' He was greatly disturbed by the vogue of Bellamy's book. In one of his letters to me at the time he said 'I suppose you have seen or read, or at least tried to read, "Looking Backward." I had to on Saturday, having promised to lecture on it. Thank you, I wouldn't care to live in such a cockney paradise as he imagines!' and in an early issue of the Commonweal he wrote a formal criticism of the book.
Sam Bullock tells me that he remembers calling, as lecture secretary of the Hammersmith Branch, on Morris one Saturday afternoon, to ask him to lecture in the Kelmscott meeting-room on the Sunday evening in place of the appointed lecturer, who was unable to come. Morris objected that he had nothing new to lecture about, and had already spoken there on any subject upon which he could find anything to say. Bullock suggested that he might make a few comments on Bellamy's book—which Morris told him he had just read. Morris brightened at the suggestion and on the Sunday evening gave a running commentary on the book, incidentally introducing by way of contrast some of his own ideas of how people might live and work in 'a new day of fellowship, rest, and happiness.' Doubtless it was this lecture which gave him the idea of writing 'News from Nowhere,' which immediately afterwards began to appear in weekly instalments in the Commonweal, and was intended as a counterblast to 'Looking Backward.' It was written for the most part in hurried snatches when travelling by train to and from the City.
Morris never intended, however, 'News from Nowhere' to be regarded as a serious plan or conspectus of Socialism, and was both surprised and amused when he found the little volume solemnly discussed as a text-book of Socialist politics, economics, and morality. The story was meant to be a sort of Socialist jeu d'esprit—a fancy picture, or idyll, or romance. It is unlikely that Morris, while deprecating the assumption in 'Looking Backward' that we can forecast the regulations and details of a future society, would himself fall into that very error.
Yet one meets with readers of 'News from Nowhere' who appear to be possessed with the idea that such whimsicalities in the story as the conversion of the present buildings of the Houses of Parliament into a manure depot, the free provision of all manner of fancifully carved tobacco pipes, and the going about of road-dustmen in gorgeous medieval raiment, constitute prime factors in Morris' conception of the Socialist Commonwealth! Nevertheless the book contains not only delightful descriptions of the beautiful stretches of the Thames Valley and charming delineations of men and women moving amidst most pleasant circumstances of life and industry, but pages of dialogue and reflection that reveal the richest thoughts of his mind and the deepest feelings of his heart. Ellen, his hostess of the Guest House, 'her face and hands and bare feet tanned quite brown with the sun,' is surely one of the most exquisite creations in prose literature, and where else have we so vividly pictured the transience of modern civilisation and the permanence of the loveliness of England as in the description of the guest's journey together with Ellen in the boat up the Thames?
- ↑ See particularly his lectures on 'How we live, and how we might live' and 'Useful Work versus Useless Toil' in his Signs of Change.