William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement/17
CHAPTER XVII
SOCIALISM AND RELIGION
RELIGION was a subject on which Morris never touched, not at any rate in a critical or confessionary way, in his writings or public addresses, and but rarely I think in private conversation. Only on one or two occasions did he ever speak of his own ideas about religion in my hearing, and the subject is rarely alluded to in his letters or conversations in Mr. Mackail's life and May Morris' biographical notes.
Usually he spoke of himself as a pagan or an atheist, but never dogmatically or boastfully; nor did he encourage argument on the subject.
He rather liked, when among us in Glasgow, to poke fun at Scottish 'unco guidism' and 'Sabbatarianism'—both of which national characteristics had, however, already become, or were becoming, issues of tradition rather than conviction so far as the bulk of the town people in Scotland were concerned.
On one occasion I happened incidentally to refer to the decay of religious observances in Scotland. 'But,' said Morris, with a challenging twinkle in his eye, 'you Scotch folk never had any religion, never at least since John Knox's day. You have merely a sort of theology, or rather a devilology mixed up with Calvinistic metaphysics.'
I retorted by saying that English people never had any religion, they had merely 'Churchgoing.' 'Perhaps you are in the main right,' he replied, 'but at any rate their churchgoing was on the whole not an unpleasant sort of pastime. Their churches were and still in many parts of the country usually are quite handsome buildings, good to look at both from the outside and the inside—but your Scottish Presbyterian conventicles—Oh my! Besides, the English Church service, however you may regard it through your Scottish "no popery" blinkers, is not at all a bad sort of way of making believe that you are grateful to Heaven for the good things and happiness of life, being that it is not Heaven's fault, but your own or somebody else's, if you don't happen to possess yourself of them and enjoy them.'
This idea of his, whimsically put as it was, that religion or religious worship, if we are to have religion at all, should be some mode of expressing the happiness of life, even as art should be, appears to have been deeply rooted in his mind. A story is related of him in connection with the Hammersmith Branch of the Socialist League meetings which is characteristic of this persuasion of his.
The branch was accustomed, as my readers know, to hold a meeting at Hammersmith Bridge on Sunday mornings in which Morris often took part. The possession of the ground was, however, contested by a group of Salvationists, who were usually on the scene an hour earlier than the Socialists. By a friendly arrangement it was eventually agreed that the Salvationists should wind up promptly at 11.30, provided the Socialists desisted until that time from any rival oratory. As often as not, however, the Salvationists, either from absorption in their mission or from, as was suspected, a desire to hold the crowd away from the 'infidel' teaching and 'worldly' hopes of the Socialists, far exceeded their allotted span of time: a breach of contract which always aroused Morris' 'dander.'
On one such occasion, losing all patience, Morris broke into the Salvationist ring, and addressing the Salvationist who was speaking exclaimed, 'Look here, my friend, you may think you are pleasing God by continuing your meeting beyond the agreed-upon time, but you are playing a nasty trick, nevertheless; and what sort of God is your God anyway? Now I'll tell you the kind of God I should want my God to be. He'd be a big-hearted, jolly chap, who'd want to see everybody jolly and happy like Himself. He would talk to us about His work, about the seasons and flowers and birds, and so forth, and would say 'Gather round, boys, here's plenty of good victuals, and good wine also—come, put your hand to and help yourselves, and we'll have a pipe and a song and a merry time together.'
No one who really believes in God as an All-benevolent, Almighty Father, and who bears in mind Morris' inherently childlike way of looking at all things from a human level, will be disposed to see anything irreverent in this outburst. His whole conception of life as consisting in fellowship, in doing things to make oneself and one's fellows happy, his hatred of cruelty and oppression, selfishness, sordidness and ugliness in every form, was, if not religion itself, at least that without which religion becomes an illogical and unfeeling pietism or pretence. And it would be hard for any theologian whose creed is in accord with the laudatory psalms, the Messianic prophecies, and the essential teaching of the Gospels, to deny that in Morris' conception of what life on earth should be, and could be, there is a much nearer approach to the true Kingdom of God than is to be found in most of the conventional devotionalism of the Churches.
Yet many who are quite ready to see in what Morris called his 'paganism' a religion of life, consistent as far as it goes with the highest spiritual ideals, are disappointed by the absence in him of apparently any interest in beliefs and hopes concerning invisible things, concerning the great questions of the existence of the world, of life, of death, of eternity—questions which have pressed on the minds of the great thinkers and poets of all ages from Job and Aeschylus, Socrates and Omar Khayyám, Dante and Shakespeare, Spinoza and Milton, Hegel and Shelley. This sense of disappointment with the lack of any spiritual purpose or spiritual hope in Morris' teaching is, if I am to judge from my own experience in later days, as well as from what I gather from my book-reading and from my conversations with others, more keenly or, at least, more widely felt now, than in Morris' day—quite recent though that be.
Supernaturalism and mysticism of every kind were then still in almost complete intellectual disrepute, bundled out of cultivated consideration by the Higher Criticism and scientific agnosticism. Thoughtful minds generally turned as implacably away from theosophy or any sort of deism or theism as from Biblical revelation. Old-world wisdom and old wives' wisdom were alike tabooed.
But a great change in the attitude of free thought is manifest since then. Earnest minds no longer presume the all-sufficiency of the laboratory and dissecting table as oracles of the mystery of matter and life. The advance of scientific knowledge—the astonishing discovery of the atom and the cell, and of the unsubstantially or unmateriality, so to speak, of matter itself, and of the elusiveness of energy and life, as indicated by the newer theories of the nature of the ether, and the acceptance of thought-transference as a physical or psychological fact—these and other remarkable scientific discoveries which are leading science to what is seemingly the borderline of a world beyond the cognizance of the bodily senses, have powerfully affected the rationalism and idealism of the present day.
So great indeed has been the reaction of intelligent opinion in this respect, that no solution, however complete it be, of the problem of human happiness in relation to the material circumstances of life, suffices for the needs of thoughtful minds. Noble and beautiful as we may succeed in making the practice of life, this achievement alone will not yield us a self-containing philosophy or religion of life. It does not provide due nourishment and exercise for the intellectual and physical faculties of a large portion of the men and women in our midst to-day. The soul or spirit puts forth imperative claims for consideration.
Sharing, as I myself now do, very largely in this changed outlook of mind, I find the question forces itself upon me as it doubtless also does on many readers of these pages—Is the gospel of Art and Socialism as exemplified in the work and teaching of William Morris adequate as a practical precept and philosophy of life? Would I, for example, say to any earnest-minded young man or woman, 'Go and follow as far as in your power lies the teaching of William Morris, and therein you will find the whole duty and Kingdom of Man?' No, indeed, I should not. My infatuation, if such it be, for Morris' genius and achievement does not carry me to so rash a conclusion. But I should unhesitatingly say 'Go to Morris and follow him as far as relates to your duty towards your fellows, as friends, citizens, and workers, as far as concerns all things embraced in the terms, Society, industry, art, politics, and the common life of the community, and you will not go far wrong; indeed I do not think you will go wrong at all.' Morris' practical teaching he himself has crystallised into an axiom: 'There are only two ways to-day of being really happy—to work for Socialism or to do work worthy of Socialism.' And to doers of the will, knowledge of the doctrine has been promised.
But having said so much on the subject of Morris and religion, I perceive I must yet, for my own satisfaction, say a word or two more. For I find myself haunted with the thought that I, like others who knew him, may have too readily assumed that because he did not in his public utterances or except in rare instances in private conversations (so far as I have heard tell) discuss the deeper questions of religion, he therefore took no interest in these questions, and possessed no beliefs or hopes concerning them. How far wrong all this may be! Indeed, considering how essentially moral (I use the word in its strongest and truest sense) was Morris' whole attitude to life, and how deeply instinctive were the powers of his nature, it seems incredible that there did not lie somewhere in him thoughts and cravings beyond what the senses and experience of what we call the material world can supply.
The fact that he did not choose to speak about these themes, that he did not feel he was likely to derive any satisfaction from the discussion of them, may as reasonably be interpreted as an indication of the deep regard in which he held them, as of mere indifference towards them. He knew enough about theological and philosophical controversy to know that all the disputation of the ages had resulted in no clearer understanding of the reason or mystery of these problems. And is it not true besides that it is often just those subjects—subjects relating to our deeper intellectual emotions—that we shrink most from dragging into the arena of discussion? They lie too deep for ratiocination. The light must come to each from within not without.
One evening, probably the last I spent with him, sitting in the library, he asked abruptly:
'Do you ever think about death? I hate to think about it, but my illness has forced the thought of it on me, worse luck. Yes, I hate it, but I don't fear it. I love life, I love the world. The world contains everything beautiful and joyful. I know of no happiness that I can desire, no life that I should wish to live, that could give me more happiness than this world and life can give. Barring human wrong-doing, and disease, decrepit old age, and death, I see no imperfection in it. Heaven, or another life beyond the grave, of which men dream and hope so fondly, could give me nothing which I possess the faculties to use or enjoy, that the present world and life cannot give, except maybe—were it true—reunion with those who have gone before or who will shortly afterwards follow. Human wrong-doing and perhaps disease can be got rid of: but old age and death are irremediable. Sometimes death appears to me awful, terrible, so cruel, so absurd. Yet there are times when I don't have that feeling and death seems sweet and desirable. I sometimes think how sweet it would be to lie in the earth at the feet of the grass and flowers, if only I could see the old church, and the meadow, and hear the birds and the voices of the village folk. But that, of course, would not be death; and I suppose that I should soon want to be up and doing. No, I cannot think it out. It is inexplicable.
'There is Tolstoy, too. There is much that is interesting in him and in his "Inward Light" idea. I do not despise his teaching. I only feel that it leads me deeper into the insoluble mystery.'
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I must warn my readers that in these jottings I am giving rather what expresses my present impression of some of Morris' observations than what he actually said or meant to convey. My mind, as I have already said, was not, at that time, closely bent on religious topics. Had I been listening to him now, or even a year or two later, when my mind was re-opening itself to the wonder of these high questions of belief—with what ardour and care I should have made record of every word of his conversation!
Only on one other occasion did he speak to me in an intimate way about the deeper problems of religion. I had not intended trying to set down in these pages his remarks on that occasion, because on my first reflecting back on our conversation my recollection of it hardly seemed to yield any additional light on the inner state of his mind. But the foregoing considerations have now made me think that I may be wrong in that judgment; and I have decided therefore to recall as clearly as I can the tenor of his remarks.
The conversation to which I refer took place during one of my last talks with him: indeed, I am not sure but that it was the very last time we spoke together in his library at Kelmscott House. I cannot now remember what led him to allude to the subject; but perhaps it arose from my having mentioned to him that I had, that morning, on my way to his house, met Mr. Touzeau Paris, a neighbour of his, formerly an ardent secularist lecturer, and now no less zealous as a propagandist in the Socialist movement.
'What are your present-day opinions about religion?' he asked abruptly.
I replied that I was still, so far as I knew, an agnostic; but that I was not so sure now as I used to be that agnosticism or materialism was the last word on the subject.
'Perhaps,' he said, 'I am much in the same position; but I have never allowed myself to worry about these questions since I was at Oxford thinking of becoming a parson. Don't you think I should have made a capital bishop?—I should like to have swaggered about in full canonicals anyway, but not in shovel hat, apron and gaiters—Oh my! But so far as I can discover from logical thinking, I am what is called bluntly an Atheist. I cannot see any real evidence of the existence of God or of immortality in the facts of the world—amazing as is the whole phenomenon of the universe. And of this I am absolutely convinced—that if there is a God, He never meant us to know much about Himself, or indeed to concern ourselves about Him at all. Had He so wished, don't you think He would have made His existence and wishes so overwhelmingly clear to us that we could not possibly have ever doubted about it at all?
'But Atheist though I must consider myself when I reason about the matter, my Atheism has as little effect upon my ordinary conduct and work-a-day views of things, as belief in Christ appears to have on the majority of Christians. So far as I commonly think and act, I do so precisely as do most other fairly sensible folk—that is to say, I think and act in accordance with the thoughts, traditions, and habits of my day and generation. Commonly, in all that concerns my thought and work, I think of God and Christ, Angels and Saints, just as do devout churchmen, and so also in a way when I think about Greek and Scandinavian mythology, I do so doubtless as the Greeks and Norsemen did. The Gods are all as real to my imagination as are historical and living persons, and their miraculous powers seem quite natural to their office, so to speak. Some people, as you know, have upbraided Burne-Jones and myself for using so much Christian legend and symbolism in our work, all of which they say is quite outside the belief of any but most crudely superstitious minds; but the fools do not perceive that with us in our art Christian legends and symbolism are as true as with any of themselves—as true and as eternal as the world itself in which we live. When, for example, I look at Burne-Jones' "The Merciful Knight," in which the Christ figure on the crucifix stoops down to kiss the Knight, the meaning and lesson of the picture is not a whit less true or real to me than to Cardinal Newman or Bishop Lightfoot. In a sense, therefore, I am just as much a Christian as are professed Christians, and in the practical sense of believing in Christ's example and teaching I am, I hope, much more a Christian than the majority of them are. And I suspect that if we got to close terms we should find also that they are just about as much Atheists and Infidels as are Annie Besant and myself. What do you think?'
Then, after a moment, he observed, 'The truth is that none of us know what actually the universe is of which we ourselves form a part. Priests, prophets, and philosophers in all ages have puzzled themselves trying to find out God, and are no nearer the end of their quest to-day than five thousand years ago. We do not know what we ourselves are, or what the world is, nor, if it comes to that, do we know what poetry, or art, or happiness is. One thing is quite certain to me, and that is that our beliefs, whatever they be, whether concerning God, or nature, or art, or happiness, are in the end only of account in so far as they affect the right doings of our lives, so far, in fact, as they make ourselves and our fellows happy. And in actual fact I find about the same amount of goodness and badness, happiness and misery among peoples of all creeds—Jew, Christian, and Gentile. On the whole, therefore, I opine that our religion, our duty, and our happiness are one and the same—and our duty and happiness is, or ought to be, to grow and live, to be beautiful and happy as the flowers and the birds are. God, if there is a God, will never be angry with us for doing or being that; and if there be, as perhaps most of us sometimes almost hope there may be, an after-life, we shan't be the less fit for its fellowship by having made ourselves good fellows in this.'