The Continuing Relevance of Visionary Socialist, William Morris (24/3/1834 – 3/10/1896)

William Morris was born in 1834 on the 24th of March 1834  in Walthamstow, Essex, the third of nine children. William's father, after whom he was named, was a self-made business man, who was able to provide an upper-middle-class lifestyle for his family because of a shrewd investment in a Devonshire mine. Although William Morris Senior died when his son was just thirteen, the wealth he had accumulated provided a generous income for the artist well into his adult life. 

In 1853, Morris began his studies in Theology at Exeter College, Oxford, planning to become a priest in line with his mother's wishes. However, within less than a year, his outlook on life had changed drastically: his reading in the library shifted from religious matters to history and ecclesiastical architecture, and eventually to the art criticism of John Ruskin. Soon, he discovered his lifelong passion for writing poetry, and his fate as a creative was sealed when he met fellow student Edward Burne-Jones, a budding artist and designer with whom he would remain friends for the rest of his life.

Morris is known today for his exquisite patterned wallpapers, his famous chair design, and his rule, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

but far more than this he was  a man of tremendous energies, his accomplishments astonishing in their range and depth. He became successively a poet , embroiderer, textile designer, artist, writer and revolutionary socialist and political agitator associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts movement. Morris was swept up in a wave of artistic creativity, in the company of artists whose work focused on nature, and the romantic chivalry of the medieval past.

Like his undergraduate hero John Ruskin, Morris's political views were inseparable from his aesthetics. He believed that art should be produced and enjoyed by all; that the products of artistic labor should be offered back to the working classes.His aim was not only to create beautiful things but also a beautiful  society.

In 1883, he joined the Social Democratic Federation, the first official socialist party established in England. Like many in the movement, Morris struggled to define his vision amid the many competing views on the ideal organization of society.

He became an important figure in the emergence of socialism in Britain, active in promoting its cause through  his writing and lecturing on street corners. Throughout  his life  he continued  to identify with the revolutionary left. He was heartened  by the Labour  movements break with liberalism,  but he warned, perhaps more clearly than anyone else at the time of the dangers of reformism.

 He advocated radical revolution and change through government reform at different times in his life. With Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl Marx, and other prominent party members, Morris formed the breakaway Socialist League in 1884.Unfortunately it lasted only six years due to lack of organising ability. The League's paper the Commonweal and Morris's writing was a legacy, due to his poems of beauty which were appreciated by so many whether they knew of the socialist league or not. 

The brutal governmental response to the Trafalgar Square riots which occurred on Bloody Sunday in November 1887, however, shocked and saddened Morris (hundreds of workers were wounded and three were killed) and he became convinced that the forces of repression were so entrenched in Victorian society that the longed-for Revolution would not come to pass during his lifetime.

 Morris wrote 'A Death Song' for the funeral on 18 December 1887 of Alfred Linnell, a week after 'Bloody Sunday',Mr Linnell's fatality occurred after a vicious clubbing where 'the crowd was batoned by the police.'

 A Death Song - William Morris

What cometh here from west to east awending?
And who are these, the marchers stern and slow?
We bear the message that the rich are sending
Aback to those who bade them wake and know.

Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,
But one and all if they would dusk the day.

We asked them for a life of toilsome earning,
They bade us bide their leisure for our bread;

We craved to speak to tell our woeful learning:
We come back speechless, bearing back our dead.
Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,
But one and all if they would dusk the day.

They will not learn; they have no ears to hearken.
They turn their faces from the eyes of fate;
Their gay-lit halls shut out the skies that darken.
But, lo! this dead man knocking at the gate.

Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,
But one and all if they would dusk the day.

Here lies the sign that we shall break our prison;
Amidst the storm he won a prisoner's rest;

But in the cloudy dawn the sun arisen
Brings us our day of work to win the best.
Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,
But one and all if they would dusk the day.

Right up to his death on October 3, 1896 he was though still agitating and arguing  for a socialist movement that would change the world . He also embraced radical ideas  of sexual freedom and libertarianism. There is a strong libertarian temper in his writings and being a close friend of Peter Kropotkin ( eminent anarchist at the time) was well aware of the anarchist case against government and political authority.
His texts  such as Useful Work Versus Useless Toil bristle with truths still relevant today. Arguing that only a classless society could eliminate the exploitation and waste of human creativity and of the world’s resources, he exclaimed: “No-one would make plush breeches when there are no flunkeys to wear them!” 
 In 1885 he bought out his Chants for Socialism and in  his novel News from Nowhere (1890) he recorded his own idiosyncratic vision after the abolition of classes. In it he envisages a society of equality and freedom and, confirmed Morris's belief in the potential of human beings to transform society, and in the process transform themselves. It is the account of a dream in which a socialist future appears in the present. It is a future without oppression, violence and drudgery. Human beings are free to enjoy their own creativity, and to 'delight in the life of the world'. But such freedom had to be fought for:

'"Tell me one thing if you can," said I. "Did the change come peacefully?' "Peacefully?" said he, "What peace was there amongst those poor confused wretches of the nineteenth century? It was war from beginning to end: bitter war, till hope and pleasure put an end to it..."' 

Such a vision - a rational grounded utopia , apparently so distant to us - is precisely what is needed for us today.
An interesting  passionate and varied life, he hated the age he lived, its commerce, its poverty, its industry, but most of all he hated its individualistic, selfish system of values. At the end of his life  he explained:. 

"The study of history and the love and practice of art forced me into a hatred of  the civilisation which, if things were to stop as they are  would turn history into inconsequent nonsense, and make art a collection  of the curiosities of the past."

When Morris lay dying in 1896 one of his doctors diagnosed his fatal illness as ‘simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men.' and  that Morris had “died the victim of his enthusiasm for spreading the principles of socialism”.

 Morris was not a politician, but an activist and agitator who brought intellectual weight and energy to the socialist cause. According to fellow party member Bruce Glasier, socialism was "integral to his genius;  it was born and bred in his flesh and bone." He gave much to British socialism,  he wrote to awaken men's imagination, to give them visions of working for a realisation of a dream, in fact he gave them comradeship. Morris's tremendous political speeches and writings were central to the revival of the British socialist movement at the end of the 19th century. Their relevance today is striking, writing in the 1890's he warned against faith in partial reforms that depended on ' parliamentary agitation' Such reforms would he believed

 ' be sucked into the tremendous stream of commercial production, and vanish into it, after having played its part as a red herring to spoil the scent of revolution.' If they wanted real change, Morris argued, 'people must take over for the good of the community all the means of production' ie credit, railways, mines, factories shipping, land machinery.'

His artistic and poetic skill, along with the radical new ethos on art and society that he espoused, sent shockwaves through the worlds of art, architecture, design, poetry, and political thought. Morris looked forward to a genuine rebirth of art as ‘the spontaneous expression of the pleasure of life innate in the whole people’ The arts and crafts movement spread across Europe and the US. Bauhaus, de Stijl and Soviet Constructivist artists were indebted to his aesthetics, if not to the style of his designs, and their placing of the unity of the arts at the heart of design education continues to this day.The William Morris Gallery is currently putting on the first ever exhibition to explore Victorian William Morris and the modernist Bauhaus  movement. Although working half a century before the Bauhaus opened its doors in 1919, Morris's ideas about art, craft and community  had a profound influence on the seminal German designer school.  Designers and artists are still inspired by Morris’s works while his questions about the social role of art and creativity were so fundamental that they remain relevant,  and many contemporary artists still look back to Morris as an inspirational figure. Jeremy Deller and David Mabb, for example, have both commented on how Morris's work contrasts with and compliments the production methods and political ethos of much twentieth-century art..William Morris’s ideas were still very much alive in the years that followed the First World War as artists and craftspeople struggled to find themselves a viable place within the modern world. Morris’s original ‘campaign against the age’ seemed essential at a period of increasing political cynicism and materialist frivolity and waste.

And his  ideals of art for the people were a central  to the planning of the Festival of Britain of 1951 who took inspiration from Morris's socialist beliefs, and from his sense of the role of the community in artistic production, introducing these principles to a new generation of creatives. The early-twentieth-century heyday of the artistic avant-garde was also in a very real sense preceded by the utopian collectivism of Morris's ventures.

In a powerful expression of continuity between reform campaigns and people throughout history, Morris appropriated the French slogan ' Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' as the head design for the Democratic Federation membership card, harking back to language and imagery used by the French  revolutionaries  at the end of the eighteenth century.The global relevance of his life and work is still felt today, with the reiterated calls  for ' Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' revealing the enduring power of words, and the humanitarian values  echoed by Morris.
Today Morris's ideas are woven into our lives , sung upon our souls, and etched into our minds, he remains a hero to socialists, communists and even anarchists who continue to strive for a new society.Morris's efforts to conserve the natural environment and to protect our architectural heritage are being carried on by people who are members of the same groups he helped to found and supported..He saw the true source of oppression as capitalism which  had to be abolished before all the resources could be used with creative freedom :

. I do not [believe] we should aim at abolishing all machinery; I would do some things with machinery which are now done by hand, and other things by hand which are now done by machinery; in short, we would be the masters of our machines and not their slaves, as we are now. It is not this or that...machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny which oppresses the lives of all of us'  

Morris's contention that art and creativity are essential contributors to well-being and that beautiful surroundings are essential for a healthy, happy and productive life, still powerfully resonates today. We read Morris's writings today because we still hold out hope for a better world. After all Morris's vision for a just society where art plays a central role has not yet been seriously tried. And although we have not yet achieved Morris's post-capitalist, ecologically healthy and economically sustainable humane society with its lively arts, his battles of over one hundred years ago have become our battles today.His words still have powerful resonance in our own turbulent times.

"The study of history and the love and practice of art forced me into a hatred of  the civilisation which, if things were to stop as they are  would turn history into inconsequent nonsense, and make art a collection  of the curiosities of the past."   - William Morris
 
All for the Cause - William Morris (from Chants for Socialists)
 
Hear a word, a word in season, for the day is drawing nigh,
When the Cause shall call upon us, some to live, and some to die!

He that dies shall not die lonely, many an one hath gone before;
He that lives shall bear no burden heavier that the life they bore.

Nothing ancient is their story, e’en but yesterday they bled,
Youngest they of earth’s beloved, last of all the valiant dead.

E’en the tidings we are telling was the tale they had to tell,
E’en the hope that our hearts cherish, was the hope for which they fell.

In the grave where tyrants thrust them, lies their labour and their pain,
But undying from their sorrow springeth up the hope again.

Mourn not therefore, nor lament it, that the world outlives their life;
Voice and vision yet they give us, making strong our hands for strife.

Some had name, and fame, and honour, learn’d they were, and wise and strong
Some were nameless, poor, unlettered, weak in all but grief and wrong.

Named and nameless all live in us; one and all they lead us yet
Every pain to count for nothing, every sorrow to forget.

Hearken how they cry, “O happy, happy ye that ye were born
In the sad slow night’s departing, in the rising of the morn.

“Fair the crown the Cause hath for you, well to die or well to live
Through the battle, through the tangle, peace to gain or peace to give.”

Ah, it may be! Oft meseemeth, in the days that yet shall be,
When no slave of gold abideth ’twixt the breadth of sea to sea,

Oft, when men and maids are merry, ere the sunlight leaves the earth,
And they bless the day beloved, all too short for all their mirth,

Some shall pause awhile and ponder on the bitter days of old,
Ere the toil of strife and battle overthrew the curse of gold;

Then ’twixt lips of loved and lover solemn thoughts of us shall rise;
We who once were fools and dreamers, then shall be the brave and wise.

There amidst the world new-builded shall our earthly deeds abide,
Though our names be all forgotten, and the tale of how we died.

Life or death then, who shall heed it, what we gain or what we lose?
Fair flies life amid the struggle, and the Cause for each shall choose.

Hear a word, a word in season , for the day is drawing nigh,
When the Cause shall call upon us, some to live, and some to die!

 No Master  

Saith man to man, We've heard and known
  That we no master need
To live upon this earth, our own,
  In fair and  mainly deed,
The grief of slaves long passed away
  For us hath forged the chain,
Till now  each worker's patient day
  Builds up the House of Pain.

And we, shall we too, crouch and quall.
  Ashamed, afraid of strife,
And lest our lives untimely fail
  Embrace the Death in Life?
Nay, cry aloud, and have no fear,
  We few against the world;
Awake, arise! the hope we bear
  Against the curse is hurled.

It grows and grows - are we the same,
  The feeble hand,  the few?
Or, what are these with  eyes aflame,
  and hands to deal and do?
This is the lost  that bears the word,
  NO MASTER HIGH OR LOW-
A lightning flame, a shearing sword,
  A storm to overthrow.

 

"If others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream" - From, News from Nowhere, William Morris. 

The following Socialist 10 Commandments inspired by William Morris remind us that the movement embraced a vision that was admirable, humane, and enlightened. Who could possibly object to such a vision?

Ten Commandments from the William Morris Hall Socialist Sunday School, Walthamstow , North London 

 

Socialist Sunday School

Ten Commandments

 

1. Love your schoolfellows, they will become your fellow workers and companions in life.

 

2. Love learning which is the food of the mind Be as graceful to your teachers as to your parents.

 

3. Make every day holy by good and useful deeds and kindly actions.

 

4. Honour good people; be courteous and respect all; bow down to none.

 

5. Do not hate or offend anyone. Do not seek revenge; defend your rights and resist tyranny.

 

6. Be not cowardly; protect the feeble and love justice.

 

7. Remember that all the products of the earth are the result of labour; whoever enjoys them without working for them is stealing the bread of the worker.

 

8. Observe and think, in order to discover the truth. Do not believe that which is contrary to reason and do not deceive yourself or others.

 

9. Do not think that he who loves his own country must hate and despise other nations, or wish for war which is a remnant of barbarism.

 

10. Help to bring about the day when all nations shall live fraternally together in peace and prosperity.

 

Declaration :

 

We desire to be just and loving to all our fellow men and women, to work together as brothers and sisters to be kind to every living creature; and so help to form a New Society, with Justice as its foundation and Love its law.

 This plaque showing the Socialist 10 Commandments is from the William Morris Hall in Walthamstow, which  was opened on 13 December 1909 by artist and socialist Walter Crane. The town was a hive of working class agitation, organising and self-help and workers had clubbed together to build the hall which they named in honour of the Arts and Crafts Movement leader and socialist dynamo who was born in the town.