William Morris

William Morris: A Life For Our Time

By Fiona MacCarthy

Faber and Faber, 1995. 780 pp., $29.95 (pb)

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/12557

One reason for the continued interest in William Morris 100 years after his death is the relevance this great 19th century artist and socialist has for many people concerned for the environment and the role socialism has to play in this. Fiona MacCarthy's biography of Morris is subtitled "A Life For Our Time". Indeed it is, though one needs the patience of Job, and then some, to make her biography yield up its lessons.

Morris' Green credentials are based on his belief in the simple life lived in harmony with nature. Some admirers, like MacCarthy, believe that Morris' contemporary relevance lies in his "marriage of socialism with a Romantic anti-industrialism". However, this view tends to downplay the "orthodox" elements of Morris' socialism.

Although Morris had a personal dislike for industrial machinery and its social effects in the factories and slums of late 19th century industrial capitalism, he accepted its necessity, under a different, socialist, system, where it is used not to exploit human beings but to provide material well-being without fouling the environment. News From Nowhere, Morris' utopian novel, is a socialist utopia because advanced technology has made possible material abundance.

MacCarthy also celebrates what she sees as Morris' kinder, gentler socialism as an alternative to the authoritarianism of "Stalin and Lenin" and the Bolsheviks' strategy of working-class power which, she thinks, must inevitably lead to a police state. Morris certainly was inclined to a strategy of educating workers, and bosses too, about the moral and scientific superiority of socialism.

Morris' fellow London resident, Engels, was frustrated with Morris, the "rich artist-enthusiast", for being "unpractical", "sentimental" and "a hopelessly muddle-headed ... poet above science". He chastised Morris for his propagandist strategy of "making socialists" through ideas alone rather than involvement in the daily round of class battles and trade union struggles.

Morris' Socialist League never quite divested itself of a sectarian belief that strikes were a diversion from real socialist activity. Yet the utopia of News From Nowhere came about through a socialist revolution in which a revolutionary party, composed of a cadre of committed socialists (the other sense of "making socialists"), provides the leadership for striking workers to take power.

Nevertheless, Morris stands at a certain personal and ideological distance from the classical revolutionary Marxist tradition. He confessed his attraction for the life of a political moderate, knowing his own weakness for "love of ease, dreaminess, sloth and sloppy good-nature". He was not the economic thinker that Marx was (whilst reading Capital, he suffered "agonies of confusion of the brain"). Morris began political life as a Romantic concerned about the waste of the human soul, alienation and the degradation of nature rather than class struggle.

Yet, for all this, Morris, like Marx, evolved from moral critique to material solution — working class revolution. Morris' Socialist League, however, was unable to link up consistently with the actual struggles of the working class, and his party languished on the fringes of the working-class movement.

After the Socialist League self-destructed thanks to police provocateurs and anarchists (who, if they weren't police provocateurs, ought to have been for the damage they did), Morris' political activity dropped off. He returned to the art and craft movement, establishing visionary craft communities which challenged established views on the separation of work and leisure.

MacCarthy claims this period as Morris' "most crucial achievement" and "the ultimate expression of his Socialist beliefs" — it's revolution, Jim, but not as we know it — but this is a debatable assessment. The high-water mark of Morris remains the decade from 1884 of memorable socialist stump speaking and lectures, and his writing for the socialist press, especially News From Nowhere and A Dream Of John Ball (which were to be found in many a striking Northumberland miner's cottage as late as the 1930s).

William Morris' legacy raises many vitally contemporary questions of politics and how life is to be lived. Unfortunately, MacCarthy's biography does not help to focus easily on them. Hers is an example of the kitchen-sink school of biography — a mass of details are held together only by the book binding, not by any controlling argument, which only the awful, generalising Marxist Morris-hunters do in their attempt to "capture" Morris.

MacCarthy has no developed ideological stance, unless it be gastronomism — by the time Morris' latest meal ("threepence worth of shrimps with ginger beer and bread and butter" on his way to a free speech demo) rolls around on page 557, the suffering reader is crying out for E.P. Thompson's indubitably Marxist biography of Morris. Morris dreamt of a socialist future of social and natural harmony.

He worked mightily in his own, albeit flawed, way, to bring this about. His contemporary, the poet Tennyson, was shocked by Morris' conversion to revolutionary socialism, and the writer George Gissing asked "Why cannot he write poetry in the shade?". Capitalism, as Morris realised, was the enemy of poetry, crafts, work, leisure, nature, life. He did more than his share to rectify this.