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Content WILLIAM MORRIS1S CONCEPTS OP IDEAL HUMAN SOCIETY
AS INDICATED IN PUBLIC LECTURES, 1877 - 1894;
AND IN THREE PROSE ROMANCES, 1886 - 1890
by
Frederick Sigmund Bromherger
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
June 1964
UMI Number: DP23029
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Ph.D. E
T h is dissertation, w ritte n by
Frederick _ _ Sigmund, ,Bromberger__..
u n d e r the d ire c tio n o f h.2*S..D issertation C om
m ittee, and app ro ve d by a ll its m embers, has
been presented to and accepted by the G raduate
S chool, in p a rtia l fu lfillm e n t o f requirem ents
fo r the degree o f
D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y
Dean
Date.
June 196ij.
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairman
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ................................... iii
CHAPTER I ..........................................1
Characteristics of the ideal human
society derived from Morris’s
lectures, 1877-1894
CHAPTER I I ........................................81
Characteristics of the ideal human
society derived from A Dream of John
Ball (1886)
CHAPTER I I I......................................103
Characteristics of the ideal human
society derived from The House of the
Wolfings (1888) and from News from
Nowhere (1890)
CHAPTER I Y .......................................147
Critical opinions of Morris's ideal
human society (in books and periodicals)
and my opinions of them
SUMMARY ........................................243
Summary of Morris’s characteristics of
the ideal human society; summary of
opinions of Morris's ideal human society
expressed by critics and by me
APPENDIX.........................................252
Manifesto of the Socialist League by
William Morris
LIST OP WORKS CITED.............................262
ii
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this study is to set forth the con
cepts of ideal human society indicated by William Morris
in his public lectures between the years 1877 and 1894,
and in his prose romances A Dream of John Ball (1886),
The House of the Wolfings (1888), and News from Nowhere
(1890); to show the critical reception of those concepts;
to give my summary of Morris’s indications; to give my
appraisal of the opinions expressed by Morris’s critics.
Each chapter will have at its end a recapitulation
of the characteristics of ideal human society that Morris
mentioned in the work or works covered in that chapter.
William Morris, "artist, writer, and socialist” (as
his daughter characterized him), was born into a family
of some wealth at Walthamstow, Essex, in 1834. He was
graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1856. The twen
ty-four volumes of his collected writings were published
between 1910 and 1915 with introductions by his daughter,
May Morris, who also published two supplementary volumes
of her father's works in 1936. His writings included
poetry, lectures (mainly to artists and socialists),
translations, prose romances, and accounts of his travels.
iii
As an artist Morris designed and (with his fellow crafts
men in Morris & Co.) manufactured furniture, wall papers,
fine carpets, tapestries, and stained-glass windows. In
1891 Morris founded the Kelmscott Press, which printed
fifty-three works. Among them was the celebrated Kelms
cott Chaucer, printed from type designed by Morris. Ihe
Kelmscott Press books quickly became famous for their
i
beauty of design, printing, and binding. Morris died at
Hammersmith, London, in 1896, ’ ’having done more work than
most ten men," as J. ¥. Mackail said at the conclusion of
his two-volume biography, Phe Life of William Morris.
i
CHAPTER I
William Morris in his first public lecture began the
long process of delineating what human society should be
by suggesting numerous changes which he hoped would
eventuate.
In 1877, in a lecture to the Trades' Guild of Learn-
ing, he said, "... I believe all the change and stir
about us is a sign of the world's life, and that it will
lead— by way, indeed, of which we have no guess— to the
bettering of all mankind” (XXII, 3).
The great function of the lesser arts, he said, was
to give man pleasure in his work. He paraphrased Ruskin's
admonition on work:
. . . the giving us pleasure in our work, I scarcely
know how to speak strongly enough of it; and yet if
I did not know the value of repeating a truth again
and again, I should have to excuse myself to you for
saying any more about this, when I remember how a
great man now living has spoken of it: I mean my
friend Professor John Ruskin: if you read the chap
ter in the 2nd vol. of his "Stones of Venice" en
titled "On the Nature of Gothic, and the Office of
the Workman therein," you will read at once the
1
"The Lesser Arts," The Collected Works of William
Morris, with Introductions by his daughter, May Morris,
XXII (London, 1914), 3-27. Hereafter quotations from the
Collected Works will be noted in the text by volume and
page numbers only.
1
2
truest and the most eloquent words that can possibly
be said on the subject. What I have to say about it
can scarcely be more than an echo of his words, yet
I repeat there is some use in reiterating a truth,
lest it be forgotten; so I will say this much fur
ther: we all know what people have said about the
curse of labour, and what heavy and grievous nonsense
are the more part of their words thereupon; whereas
indeed the real curses of craftsmen have been the
curse of stupidity, and the curse of injustice from
within and from without: no, I cannot suppose there
is anybody here who would think it either a good life,
or an amusing one, to sit with one's hands before one
doing nothing— to live like a gentleman, as fools
call it. (XXII, 5-6)
He admitted, however, that most work was dull and
wearying; all this could be changed so that man would en
joy his labours:
. . .let the arts which we are talking of beautify
our labour, and be widely spread, intelligent, well
understood, both by the maker and the user, let them
grow in one word, popular, and there will be pretty
much an end of dull work and its wearing slavery;
and no man will any longer have an excuse for talk
ing about the curse of labour, no man will any long
er have an excuse for evading the blessing of labour.
I believe there is nothing that will aid the world's
progress as much as this; I protest there is nothing
in the world that I desire so much as this, wrapped
up, as I am sure it is, with changes political and
social, that in one way or another we all desire.
(XXII, 6)
Having established the necessity for pleasure in the
process of doing worthwhile work that entailed artistic
satisfactions of man's sense of beauty, Morris established
his first point concerning the condition under which man
could create: freedom.
. . . among some nations, their most vigorous and
freest times have been the very blossoming-time of
art: while at the same time, I must allow that
{ these decorative arts have flourished among oppressed
3
peoples, who have seemed to have no hope of freedom:
yet I do not think that we shall he wrong in think
ing that at such times, among such peoples, art, at
least, was free; when it has not been, when it has
really been gripped by superstition, or by luxury,
it has straightway begun to sicken under the grip.
(XXII, 6)
Morris thought that his own time was sick because the
arts were not allowed to flourish, and his great hope for
the future lay in the social changes which he thought to
be imminent.
Sirs, I say that this dead blank of the arts that I
more than dread is difficult even now to imagine;
yet I fear that I must say that if it does not come
about, it will be owing to some turn of events which
we cannot at present foresee: but I hold that if it
does happen, it will only last for a time, and it
will be but a burning up of the gathered weeds, so
that the field may bear more abundantly. I hold
that men would wake up after a while, and look around
and find the dulness unbearable, and begin once more
inventing, imitating, and imagining, as in earlier
days. (XXII, 11)
Where were men to begin, Morris asked, if the lack of
art in the world meant the loss of peace and the good
life?
I think that they must begin by acknowledging that
the ancient art, the art of unconscious intelligence,
as one should call it, which began without a date, at
least so long ago as those strange and masterly
scratchings on mammoth-bones and the like found the
other day in the drift— that this art of unconscious
intelligence is all but dead; that what little of it
is left lingers among half-civilized nations, and is
growing coarser, feebler, less intelligent year after
year; . . . this they must recognize, and must hope
to see in time its place filled by a new art of con
scious intelligence, the birth of wiser, simpler,
freer ways of life than the world leads now, than
the world has ever led. (XXII, 12)
To achieve the simple, free, artistic, pleasure-in-
4
labor world of which Morris dreamed, man would have to be
come deeply aware of nature again and study the historical
development of the arts.
For your teachers, they must be Nature and His
tory: as for the first, that you must learn of it is
so obvious that I need not dwell upon that now ....
As to the second, I do not think that any man but one
of the highest genius, could do anything in these
days without study of ancient art, and even he would
be much hindered if he lacked it. (XXII, 15)
Morris believed that the besetting evil of his times
was pecuniary gain that made man overproduce what people
did not want or need. Mankind needed to regain a sense
of moral values so that
. . . we may adorn life with the pleasure of cheer
fully buying goods at their due price; with the pleas
ure of selling goods that we could be proud of both
for their fair price and fair workmanship; with the
pleasure of working soundly and without haste at mak
ing goods that we could be proud of . . . . (XXII, 23)
He defined a work of art with a negative approach:
". . . nothing can be a work of art which is not useful;
that is to say, which does not minister to the body when
well under command of the mind, or which does not amuse,
soothe, or elevate the mind in a healthy state” (XXII, 23)
Thus, works of art could be produced only when man again
achieved simplicity in his life; Morris insisted that
"simplicity of taste, that is, a love for sweet and lofty
things, is of all matters most necessary for the birth of
the new and better art we crave for; simplicity every
where, in the palace as well as in the-cottage” (XXII, 24)
5
Along with simplicity, Morris urged, cleanliness and
decency everywhere "in the cottage as well as in the pal
ace: the lack of that is a serious piece of manners for
us to correct" (XXII, 24).
He feared that science was in the pay of the counting
house and would do nothing, hut science could teach Man
chester how to consume its smoke and might help Leeds to
prevent its throwing superfluous black dye into the river.
Altogether, however, man was not interested in putting his
scientific efforts into making for the good life; so Mor
ris held little hope for any aid from this quarter. For
Morris, art was the answer, for it could give man "pleas
ure for the eyes and rest for the mind" (XXII, 25). Sci
ence benefited the few wealthy and educated; whereas art
could be enjoyed and practiced by all. Like education and
freedom, it was not for the few (XXII, 26).
Morris summarized his hopes for a better society in a
paragraph near the end of his first lecture:
I have a sort of faith, though, that this chearing
away of all art will not happen, that men will get
wiser, as well as more learned; that many of the in
tricacies of life, on which we now pride ourselves
more than enough, partly because they are new, partly
because they have come with the gain of better things,
will be cast aside as having played their part, and
being useful no longer. I hope that we shall have
leisure from war— war commercial, as well as war of
the bullet and the bayonet; leisure from the knowledge
that darkens counsel; leisure above all from the greed
of money, and the craving for that overwhelming dis
tinction that money now brings: I believe that as we
have even now partly achieved LIBERTY, so we shall one
day achieve EQUALITY, which, and which only, means,
6
FRATERNITY, and so have leisure from poverty and all
its griping, sordid eares. (XXII, 26)
Morris believed that the changes occurring in 1877
would eventually make for a bettering of mankind. The
widespread practice of the lesser arts (or the decorative
arts) would make it possible for all mankind to take
pleasure in work. Art, he believed, could flourish only
when men were free to create, that is, free from the ne
cessity of working for monetary gain. Before he could
create works of art, man needed to live a simpler life
than he did in 1877, and he needed to be more aware than
he was of nature and of history, and he needed to regain
moral values, which had been corrupted.
Science would be of little help in bringing about the
changes except to clean up the ugliness for which factor
ies were accountable. When the changes for which he hoped
would have come about, Morris believed that equality (true
fraternity) would obtain among men, and then men would
have the leisure to create without the fear of poverty.
When, in February of 1879> Morris delivered the pres
idential lecture, ’ ’The Art of the People," to the Birming-
2
ham Society of Arts and School- of Design, his position
concerning the weaknesses of his society had changed very
little from that held in December of 1877.
lamenting the fact that most of the contemporary
^Collected Works. XXII, 28-50.
7
leaders of modern thought "sincerely and single-mindedly"
hated and despised the arts, he recognized himself and his
audience as a "minority that is right, as minorities some
times are. "
I wish people to understand that the art we are striv
ing for is a good thing which we can all share, which
will elevate all; in good sooth, if all people do not
soon share it there will soon he none to share; if
all are not elevated hy it, mankind will lose the ele
vation it has gained. (XXII, 39)
Morris expressed the fear that civilization would de
cline with the diminishing of the arts, and he restated an
\
earlier idea, ” . . . , „ that the chief duty of the civilized
world today is to set about making labour happy for us
all, to do its utmost to minimize the amount of unhappy
labour ..." (XXII, 43).
Morris held that art could not be dissociated from
morality, politics, and religion, which is to say that it
was involved, or should be involved, in nearly everything
that man did. Again speaking about the necessary changes
that must take place before art could assume its rightful
place among men, he said:
. . . there are two virtues much needed in modern
life, if it is ever to become sweet; and I am quite
sure that they are absolutely necessary in the sow
ing the seed of an art which is to be made for the
people and by the people, as a happiness to the
maker and the user. These virtues are honestyand
simplicity of life. To make my meaning clearer I
will name the opposing vice of the second of these
— luxury to wit. Also I mean by honesty, the care
ful and eager giving his due to every man, the de
termination not to gain by any man’s loss, which in
my experience is not a common virtue.
8
But note how the practice of either of these vir
tues will make the other easier for us. For if our
wants are few, we shall have little chance of being
driven by our wants into injustice; and if we are
fixed in the principle of giving every man his due,
how can our self-respect bear that we should give
too much to ourselves? (XXII, 47-48)
When men learned again to be just, i.e., not to en
slave their neighbors or to enjoy something which had pro
duced pain and grief in the creator, then Morris thought
a new springtime of the arts would appear. The desire to
re-institute the arts among all mankind was the driving
force at the bottom of Morris's desire to change society
as he knew it in the late 1870's (XXII, 28-50).
At the beginning of the "Art of the People" lecture,
Morris used as an epigraph a quotation from Daniel Defoe,
who had made a point that was extremely important to Mor
ris's cause:
i , ; And the men of labour spent their strength in
daily struggling for bread to maintain the vital
strength they labour with: so living in a daily
circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and work
ing but to live, as if daily bread were the only end
of a wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only
occasion of daily bread.' (XXII, 28)
One important idea in Morris's plan for a future
society was added in another lecture delivered in 1879*
He here indicated exactly where the artistic work was to
take place:
. . . there is no way out of it but by insisting that
all men's work shall be fit for free men and not for
3“Making the Best of Itt"Collected Works, XXII, 81-119.
9
machines: my extravagant hope is that people will
some day learn something of art, and so long for
more, and will find, as I have, that there is no
getting it save by the general acknowledgment of the
right of every man to have fit work to do in a beau
tiful home. (XXII, 86)
Apparently Morris desired each man to work in his own
home.
In this lecture, too, Morris made clear that the re
bellion which he hoped to stir up was to eliminate some of
the unnatural foolishness into which man's customs had
brought him:
. . . I must confess that I should hold my peace on
all matters connected with the arts, if I had not a
lurking hope to stir up both others and myself to
discontent with and rebellion against things as they
are, clinging to the further hope that our discon
tent may be fruitful and our rebellion steadfast, at
least to the end of our own lives, since we believe
that we are rebels not against the laws of Mature,
but the customs of Polly. (XXII, 82)
Here he was chiefly concerned with ideas on the ar
tistic decoration of homes, but he did not hesitate to use
the occasion to restate some of his revolutionary ideas
about why and how society must change its present state if
man were to approach a better state.
In 1880, in another address, called "The Beauty of
Life,” delivered to the Birmingham Society of Arts and
School of Design,^ Morris stated more of his hopes for a
better society, and stated them frequently by the indirec
tion of criticizing the practices of his own society. In
^Collected Works. XXII, 51-80.
10
this address he again felt it necessary to "call the
faithful of art to a battle wider and more distracting
than that kindly struggle with nature, to which all true
craftsmen are born ...” (XXII, 51).
The great danger in his society, he said, was "that
men in struggling towards the complete attainment of all
the luxuries of life for the strongest portion of their
race should deprive their whole race of all the beauty of
life" (XXII, 51-52).
During the Renaissance, he said, "a deadly chill fell
upon the arts" which actually regressed, and they did not
know a rebirth until the beginning of the Romantic move
ment with "the music of Blake and Coleridge." The bad
effects of the Renaissance, he said, were summed up in
his own century, which he called the Century of Commerce,
and about which he said:
. . . I do not think I undervalue the work it has
done: it has broken down many a prejudice and taught
many a lesson that the world has been hitherto slow
to learn: it has made it possible for many a man to
live free, who would in other times have been a slave,
body, or soul, or both: if it has not quite spread
peace and justice through the world, as at the end of
the first half we fondly hoped it would, it has at
least stirred up in many fresh cravings for peace and
justice: its work has been good and plenteous, but
much of it was roughly done, as needs was; reckless
ness has commonly gone with its energy, blindness too
often with its haste: so that perhaps it may be work
enough for the next century to repair the blunders of
that recklessness, to clear away the rubbish which
hurried work has piled up; nay, even we in the second
half of its last quarter may do something towards
setting the house in order. (XXII, 61)
11
Universal education would be man’s hope in the next
century, Morris believed:
. . . doubtless education will both grow in quality
and in quantity; so that it may be, that as the nine
teenth century is to be called the Century of Com
merce, the twentieth may be called the Century of Ed
ucation. But that education does not end when people
leave school is now a mere commonplace; and how then
can you really educate men who lead the life of ma
chines , who only think for the few hours during which
they are not at work, who in short spend almost their
whole lives in doing work which is not proper for de
veloping them body and mind in some worthy way? You
cannot educate, you cannot civilize men, unless you
give them a share in art. (XXII, 63)
Morris urged that it was the responsibility of art
ists and of everyone else to bring about a more nearly
complete civilization than his century knew, and that the
change could not be in favor of a few: ”. . . the civi
lization which does not carry the whole people with it is
doomed to fall, and give place to one which at least aims
at doing so” (XXII, 64).
After outlining at some length the specific things
which artists could do to help effect a better world, he
said:
But some, I know, think that the attaining of
these very comforts is what makes the difference be
tween civilization and uncivilization, that they are
the essence of civilization. Is it so indeed? Fare
well my hope thenl— I had thought that civilization
meant the attainment of peace and order and freedom,
of goodwill between man and man, of the love of
truth and the hatred of injustice and by consequence
the attainment of the good life which these things
breed, a life free from craven fear, but full of in
cident . . . not more stuffed chairs and more cush
ions, and more carpets and gas, and more dainty meat
and drink— and therewithal more and sharper differences
between class and class.
12
Believe me, if we want art to begin at borne, as it
must, we must elear our houses of troublesome super
fluities that are forever in our way: conventional
comforts that are no real comforts, and but make work
for servants and doctors: if you want a golden rule
that will fit everybody, this is it:
Have nothing in your houses that you do not know
to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. (XXII,75-76)
I Morris's untitled address to the Kyrle Society in
I
5
1880, one of his first addresses on Socialism, dealt more
with the necessity for changing society than with any
other topic. The nature and the direction of the social
changes he proposed were the subjects with which he was
concerned in this lecture. He knew that soeiety could not
be changed immediately, but his long-range hopes were for
a society which would make mankind as a whole happier.
These proposed changes had great appeal for the common
workers, especially if they had artistic proclivities,
but higher-class people (with financial means) were, to
his disappointment, seldom interested in supporting his
program for soeial change.
Concerning the matter of changing men he said:
If you want to convert people to a new and unpopular
creed that obviously has no immediate material advan
tages, no loaves and fishes, to offer, you must not
expect at first to get hold of persons whose intelli
gence is not somewhat above the average; and to such
extra intelligent persons your opportunity will be
5
May Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer,
Socialist (Oxford, 1936), II, 197-205. (Hereafter these
(two volumes will be referred to in the notes as "Supple
ment T" and "Supplement IT.”______________________________
13
too transparent for deception; so I think it is always
"best to face the matter from the first, and to say
right out that Democracy or Radicalism is not incipi
ent Socialism although the two things have something
in common; that it is not a small change in life that
we advocate, but a very great one; that Socialism
will transform our lives and habits, and leave the
greater part of the political social and religious
controversies that we are not so hot about forgotten,
useless and lifeless like wrecks stranded on a sea
shore. (Supplement II, 198-199)
Equality was an important part of Morris1s ideal hu
man society, as has already been noted in his lectures to
artists; his ideal of equality he stated briefly here:
. . .1 have just admitted that there must be a tran
sitional period before this ideal can be realized; a
transition during which democracy or radicalism will
work itself by performing its ultimate function.of
getting rid of the fag end of the idea surviving from
the epoch before this, the feudal epoch, of a hier
archy of divinely appointed government, which idea
takes refuge now in places quite unexpected by the
Radicals of 50 years ago in the form of the claim of
an aristocracy of intellect to govern the average man
for his own good even if he suffers by it.
Having said so much I must now tell you what I
mean by equality, so that we may not begin by misun
derstanding. I have advisedly used the phrase equal
ity of condition; for of course I admit that it is
[no] J_siej more possible that men should be equal in
capacity or desires or temperament than that they
should be equal in stature or in weight: but in fact
if there were not this inequality in this sense I
would doubt if we could have equality of condition;
I think in that case we should begin again to create
artificial inequalities and so get back to something
like our present condition. But the variety of ca
pacity and gifts and to a certain extent of desires
is just what will enable us in the long run to live
without competition, that is to say, without forci
bly taking from others to aggrandize ourselves;
since if our labour were properly organized it would
be easy to produce enough of all ordinary objects of
desire to satisfy the needs of all; and as for ex
traordinary objects of desire the innate variety of
, disposition would prevent competition when life was
jeasy enough to allow each man to sacrifice something
H
he desired little for something he desired much with
out forcing someone else to forgo his desire. (Supple
ment II, 199-200)
But how should society work for the common good?
Here Morris was again concerned with the society of the
future, especially as that society might bring about hap
piness for everyone. The society of his own day offered
little hope for the future happiness of workers, being "a
mass of corruption, luxury, waste and confusion such as
the world has never seen before" (Supplement II, 2G0).
He said that the artificial wants and wastes of his day
were produced by labor
. . . and no man who has ever thought about the matter
at all can doubt that a man working in civilization
with co-operation and by means of machinery and work
shop organization can produce more than enough to keep
himself in mere necessities, or that if his labour
were properly organized toward the production of use
ful things there would be enough wealth produced to
enable everyone to live comfortably except those who
were criminally idle. If this is the case it is
clearly owing to some huge blunder that our present
gross inequalities exist; it is owing to the fact that
our society has missed the aim of true society, which
I must now again assert to be the satisfaction of the
wants of everybody in the community in return for the
exercise of their faculties for the benefit of the
community. Or as the formula of us Communists has
it: To every one according to his needs, from every
one according to his capacities. (Supplement II,
200-201)
Morris recognized that a laborer could raise himself
jto the level of the privileged class, and this possibility
be called the safety-valve without which society
. . . would at once explode in mere violence. But
this safety valve is the creation of the ideal of
commercial society which puts forward the acquirement
15
of riches as the one aim of life; i.e., bids every
man struggle to attain a position of social useless
ness as the reward of labour .... (Supplement I, 202)
Although Morris had been urging revolutionary change
from about 1877, he desired a gradual, well-directioned
change, not the explosion that he thought would come if
the above-mentioned single aim in life continued.
low this safety-valve, called in the ignorant illogi
cal sham scientific jargon of the day, the law of the
selection of the fittest applied to society, is being
at present attacked by the two greatest forces which
rule the world, lecessity and Morality. And I say
once more that if we pay no heed to the matter and
give it all up to the hands of necessity, Society will
explode volcanically with such a crash as the world
has not yet witnessed. (Supplement II, 202)
Morris again and again stressed that the labor con
ditions of his time made it impossible for the workers to
be happy and, further, he believed that the conditions
made it impossible for a great man ever to arise from
among the beleaguered slaves of commercial bosses.
. . . do you think it is not ill that a hundred thou
sand harmless people should be boiled down on the
fire of misery to make one single glorious great man?
I honestly believe that there are people who are
fools enough to think that. I answer plainly, great
men are nourished on no such soup, though prigs may
be; it is the happiness of the people that produces
the blossom of genius. But even if it were so I
should say that I would rather have a hundred thou
sand happy persons than one genius made up of murder.
(Supplement II, 203)
In the three years of lecturing during which Morris
was beginning to agitate for a better world for all men
he had changed his main emphasis in only one place: he
|was no longer so much concerned that men practice art in
16
the society of the future as he was that they he happily
employed, preferably at home, in beautiful surroundings,
creating and growing only as much as they actually needed
so that no waste existed, and plenty was available to all;
no misery, starvation, slavery, or anyone working for mon
etary gain or great power.
Early in 1881 Morris again addressed the Kyrle Soci
ety at its meeting in the Kensington Yestry Hall.^ He was
happy to be a part of a group of prominent citizens who
were dedicated in their organization to combatting care
lessness, ugliness, and squalor. In urging their programs
for keeping grassy plots and trees in the city of London
to maintain Mthe natural beauty of the earth,” he men
tioned and accepted for himself the ideal for which the
Kyrle Society was working:
Eor think of the lofty ideal that lies before us,
of Society all changed for the better; how we look
forward to the day when poverty shall be a name only
for a dreadful phantom of the past; when the brutal
ity of the poor and the insolence of the rich shall
have been slain by hope and pleasure shared by all;
when the man of the most refined occupation, student,
artist, physician, what not, shall be able to speak
to him who does the roughest labour in a tongue that
they both know, and to find no intricacy of his mind
misunderstood; and when as sign and symbol of all
this, and the necessary outcome of it, this very
London . . . shall have become a delightful abode of
men, full of beauty and guiltless of any spot of
squalor. (Supplement I, 194-195)
He had not forgotten about the importance of art in
Supplement I, 192-197
17
his ideal society, however, for he reminded his listeners
near the end of this address:
And I must take leave to say that those who may
think this a contribution of small moment towards the
perfection of our civilization, do not know whence
art springs or whither it aims. Its aim is the mak
ing life happy and dignified for all people . . . if
the people do not insist on having their share of it,
I know most surely that art will die out of civili
zation. I am wondering if civilization will live
when art is dead. (Supplement I, 196)
In October.of 1881 Morris delivered a lecture, at
Burslem Town Hall, which he called "Art and the Beauty of
7
the Barth." Tracing briefly the history of art in the
western world, he declared again that his age was affected
for the worse by the men of the Renaissance, who "lent all
their energies, consciously or unconsciously, to the sev
erance of art from the daily lives of men ..." (XXII,
162).
Again he affirmed the necessity for man's deciding
whether he would espouse art as part of his normal exist
ence (whereby he would enjoy his daily work) or reject
art and thus hate work so that men would "Do their utmost
to reduce the work of the world to a minimum" (XXII, 166),
and thus have to resort to machines to do what had given
them pleasure in the creative process before. The world
for which Morris hoped would again accept art as a part of
the daily lives of all men with the following.results:
^Collected Works. XXII, 155-174.
18
You will have it [art] with you in your sorrow as in
your joy, in your work-a-day hours as in your lei
sure. It shall be no respecter of persons, but be
shared by gentle and simple, learned and unlearned,
and be a language that all can understand. It will
not hinder any work that is necessary to the life of
man at the best, but it will destroy all degrading
toil, all enervating luxury, all foppish frivolity.
It will be the deadly foe of ignorance, dishonesty,
and tyranny, and will foster good-will, fair deal
ing, and confidence between man and man. It will
teach you to respect the highest intellect with a
manly reverence, but not to despise any man who does
not pretend to be what he is not; and that which will
be the instrument that it shall work with and the
food that shall nourish it shall be man's pleasure in
his daily labour, the kindest and best gift that the
world has ever had. (XXII, 165)
Again Morris argued the necessity of universal edu
cation:
Well, I have said that education is the first remedy
for the barbarism which has been bred by the hurry of
civilization and competitive commerce. To know that
men lived and worked mightily before you is an incen
tive for you to work faithfully now, that you may
leave something to those who come after you. (XXII,
169)
In this lecture Morris defined more exactly than he
had heretofore, on a more practical and attainable level,
what he meant by a beautiful place in which men are to
live:
I abide by my statement that those who are to make
beautiful things must live in beautiful places, but
you must understand that I do not mean to claim for
all craftsmen a share of those gardens of the world,
or of those sublime and awe-inspiring mountains and
wastes that men make pilgrimages to see; that is to
say, not a personal share. Most of us must be con
tent with the tales of the poets and painters about
these places, and learn to love the narrow spot that
surrounds our daily life for what of beauty and sym
pathy there is in it.
For surely there is no square mile of earth's
19
inhabitable surface that is not beautiful in its own
way, if we men will only wilfully abstain from de
stroying that beauty; and it is this reasonable share
in the beauty of the earth that I claim as the right
of every man who will earn it by due labour; a decent
house with decent surroundings for every honest and
industrious family; that is the claim which I make of
you in the name of art. Is it such an exorbitant
claim to make of civilization? (XXII, 170)
On March 6, 1883, after making clear to the joint
Q
Conversazione of Manchester Societies that his chief
business among them was to spread discontent, and to urge
changes toward a better society, Morris described the
ideal society in this detailed fashion:
I want, then, all persons to be educated according to
their capacity, not according to the amount of money
which their parents happen to have. I want all per
sons to have manners and breeding according to their
innate goodness and kindness, and not according to
the amount of money which their parents happen to
have. As a consequence of these two things I want to
be able to talk to any of my countrymen in his own
tongue freely, and feeling sure that he will be able
to understand my thoughts according to his innate ca
pacity; and I also want to be able to sit at table
with a person of any occupation without a feeling of
awkwardness and constraint being present between us.
I want no one to have any money except as due wages
for work done; and, since I feel sure that those who
do the most useful work will neither ask nor get the
highest wages, I believe that this change will de
stroy that worship of a man for the sake of his
money, which everybody admits is degrading, but which
very few indeed can help sharing in. I want those
who do the rough work of the world, sailors, miners,
plowmen, and the like, to be treated with considera
tion and respect, to be paid abundant money-wages and
to have plenty of leisure. I want modern science,
which I believe to be capable of overcoming all mate
rial difficulties, to turn from such preposterous
®MArt, Wealth, and Riches,* * Collected Works, XXIII,
143-163. “
20
follies as the invention of anthracine colours and
monster cannon to the invention of machines for per
forming such labour as is revolting and destructive
of self-respect to the men who now have to do it by-
hand. I want handicraftsmen proper, that is, those
who make wares, to be in such a position that they
may be able to refuse to make foolish and useless
wares, or to make the cheap and nasty wares which
are the mainstay of competitive commerce, and are in
deed slave-wares, made by and for slaves. And in or
der that the workmen may be in this position, I want
division of labour restricted within reasonable lim
its , and men taught to think over their work and take
pleasure in it. I also want the wasteful system of
middlemen restricted, so that workmen may be brought
into contact with the public, who will thus learn
something about their work, and so be able to give
them due reward of praise for excellence.
Furthermore, I want the workmen to share the good
fortunes of the business which they uphold, in due
proportion to their skill and industry, as they must
in any case share its bad fortunes. To which end it
would be necessary that those who organize their la
bour should be paid no more than due wages for their
work, and should be chosen for their skill and intel
ligence, and not because they happen to be the sons
of money-bags. Also I want this, and, if men were
living under the conditions I have just claimed for
them, I should get it, that these islands which make
the land we love should no longer be treated as here
a cinder-heap, and there a game preserve, but as the
fair green garden of Northern Europe, which no man
on any pretence should be allowed to befoul or dis
figure. Under all these conditions I should certain
ly get the last want accomplished which I am now
going to name. I want all the works of man's hand
to be beautiful, rising in fair and honourable gra
dation from the simplest household goods to the
stately public building, adorned with the handiwork
of the greatest masters of expression which that real
new birth and the dayspring of hope come back will
bring forth for us. (XXIII, 160-161)
"These," he went on to say, "are the foundations of
my Utopia, a city in which riches and poverty will have
21
q
been conquered by wealth . . ."
Morris took special pains to define the word reward
as it would have currency in his Utopian system:
Understand, by reward, I don't mean only money wages,
but social position, leisure, and above all, the
self-respect which comes of our having the opportunity
of doing remarkable and individual work, useful for
one's fellows to possess, and pleasant for oneself to
do;.work which at least deserves thanks whether it
gets them or not. (XXIII, 156)
The loss of the instinct for beauty, a loss which re
sulted in a serious decline in the popular arts and in thej
destruction of the beauty of the earth, was the subject of
Morris's lecture "Art under Plutocracy," delivered at Uni-
1G
versity College, Oxford, on November 14, 1885* Decrying
the commercialism and profit motives that were bringing
ugliness to England, Morris asserted, "It is my business
here tonight and everywhere to foster your discontent"
with the "degrading anarchy which has usurped the name of
Society" (XXIII, 181). He then described a more practical
ideal society than he had heretofore.
And amidst all this I feel sure, I say, that you all
of you have some ideal of a state of things better
than that amidst which we live, something, I mean to
say, more than the application of temporary pallia-
^Early in this same lecture Morris defined wealth
as the means of living a decent life and riches as "the
means for exercising dominion over other people." (XXIII,
143)
1 Collected Works, XXIII, 164-192. This lecture was
called "Art and Democracy" by May Morris in her list of
Morris's principal lectures, Supplement II, 639*__________
22
tives to the enduring defects of our civilization.
Now it seems to me that the ideal of better times
which the more advanced in opinion of our own class
have formed as possible and hopeful is something like
this. There is to be a large class of industrious
people not too much refined (or they could not do the
rough work wanted of them), who are to live in com
fort (not, however, meaning our middle-class comfort),
and receive a kind of education (if they can), and
not be overworked; that is, not overworked for a work
ingman; his light day's work would be rather heavy for
the refined classes. This class is to be the basis of
society, and its existence will leave the consciences
of the refined class quite free and at rest. Prom
this refined class will come the directors or captains
of labour (in other words the usurers), the directors
of people's consciences religious and literary (cler
gy, philosophers, newspaper-writers), and lastly, if
that be thought of at all, the directors of art; these
two classes with or without a third, the functions of
which are indefinite, will live together with the
greatest goodwill, the upper helping the lower with
out sense of condescension on one side or humiliation
on the other; the lower are to be perfectly content
with their position, and there is to be no grain of
antagonism between the classes: although (even Uto
pianism of this kind being unable to shake off the
idea of the necessity of competition between indivi
duals) the lower class, blessed and respected as it
is to be, will have moreover the additional blessing
of hope held out to it; the hope of each man rising
into the upper class, and leaving the chrysalis of
labour behind him; nor, if- that matters, is the lower
class to lack due political or parliamentary power;
all men (or nearly all) being equal before the ballot-
box, except so far as they may be bought like other
things. That seems to me to be the middle-class lib
eral ideal of reformed society; all the world turned
bourgeois, big and little, peace under the rule of
competitive commerce, ease of mind and a good con
science to all and several under the rule of the devil
take the hindmost. (XXIII, 181-182)
Morris went on to say of this quite realistic "ideal"
world, "I have nothing, positively nothing to say against
jit if it can be brought about. Religion, morality, art,
literature, science, might for all I know flourish under
23
it and make the world a heaven" (XXIII, 182). His chief
concern in this lecture, however, was with the individuals
who hoped for a better world of some kind hut who did
nothing to help bring one about. "What have they done?"
he asked. "How much nearer are they to the ideal of the
bourgeois commonwealth than they were at the time of the
Reform Bill or the time of the repeal of the Corn Laws?"
(XXIII, 183)
In contrast to the bourgeois ideal that most of soci
ety would probably accept, Morris suggested at the end of
his lecture the ideal of a classless society:
Will you think it monstrous that some people have
conceived another hope, and see before them the ideal
of a society in which there should be no classes per
manently degraded for the benefit of the commonweal?
(XXIII, 185)
He wanted a society that wasted nothing, that could
live peacefully by way of eliminating economic strife
among competitors:
I have a last word or two to say in begging them to
renounce their class pretensions and cast in their
lot with the working men. . . .
Art is long and life is short; let us at least do
something before we die. We seek perfection, but
can find no perfect means to bring it about; let it
be enough for us if we unite with those whose aims
are right and their means honest and feasible.
( x x m , 190-191)
In this lecture Morris used for the first time the
term "perfection" to describe the end toward which his
socialistic plans were, he hoped, moving. The hope for a
perfect human society, in contrast to the practical
24
society that he described in this lecture, indicated for
the first time a realization of the distance between what
he wanted and what might be expected.
To the Hampstead Liberal Club, Morris, in 1884, de
livered an address entitled “Useful Work versus Useless
11
Toil,” in which several facets of his ideal society were
discussed for the first time. He discussed the problems
that resulted when some classes of society had as their
aim no work at all, thus making themselves burdens upon
those who did work.
for Morris work was no curse as long as man could
work hopefully for rest from the ordeal of his labors, and
for a good product (one that was wanted and usable), and
he could take pleasure in his work. But before hope could
exist for people of the laboring classes a major change
would have to occur: Heedless work would have to be
abolished.
All must work according to their ability, and so pro
duce what they consume-— that is, each man should work
as well as he can for his own livelihood, and his
livelihood should be assured to him; that is to say,
all the advantages which society would provide for
each and all of its members.
Thus, at last, would true Society be founded. It
would rest on equality of condition. Ho man would
be tormented for the benefit of Society. Hor, in
deed can that order be called Society which is not '
upheld for the benefit of every one of its members.
(XXIII, 106)
1 Collected Works, XXIII, 98-120.
25
Because of the unequal work loads many people were
forced to labor needlessly. The better state would be
possible, he said,
. . . when all were working usefully for its support,
the share of work which each would have to do would
be but small, if our standard of life were about on
the footing of what well-to-do and refined people
now think desirable. We shall have labour*power to
spare, and shall, in short, be as wealthy as we
please. It will be easy to live. (XXIII, 107)
Morris was obviously concerned about his continued
use of the word "revolution" in his many addresses, and
he found it necessary, as in this lecture, to restate
that his anarchism and his desire for revolutionary
change did not call for a sudden, volcanic upheaval but
rather called for a carefully contemplated, slow change
to a world of happy working conditions for everyone.
But when revolution has made it "easy to live,"
when all are working harmoniously together and there
is no one to rob the worker of his time, that is to
say, his life; in those coming days there will be no
compulsion on us to go on producing things we do not
want, no compulsion on us to labour for nothing; we
shall be able calmly and thoughtfully to consider
what we shall do with our wealth of labour-power.
How, for my part, I think the first use we ought to
make of that wealth, of that freedom, should be to
1 2
Morris’s definition of wealth: "Wealth is what
Hature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of
the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight,
the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, rai
ment, and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of
knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it;
means of free communication between man and man; workb of
iart, the beauty which man creates when he is most a man,
jmost aspiring and thoughtful— all things which serve the
|pleasure of people, free, manly, and uncorrupted. This
!is wealth." (XXIII, 103) ______________________________
26
make all our labour, even the commonest and most
necessary, pleasant to everybody; for thinking over
the matter carefully I can see that the one course
which will certainly make life happy in the face of
all accidents and troubles is to take a pleasurable
interest in all the details of life. (XXIII, 108)
He then moved again to the problem of convincing his
hearers that work should be enjoyable:
The first step towards making labour attractive is
to get the means of making labour fruitful, the Cap
ital, including the land, machinery, factories, &c.,
into the hands of the community, to be used for the
good of all alike, so that we might all work at
"supplying” the real "demands” of each and all— that
is to say, work for livelihood, instead of working
to supply the demand of the profit market— instead
of working for profit— i.e., the power of compelling
other men to work against their will.
When this first step has been taken and men begin
to understand that Hature wills all men either to
work or starve, and when they are no longer such
fools as to allow some the alternative of stealing,
when this happy day is come, we shall then be re
lieved from the tax of waste, and consequently shall
find that we have, as aforesaid, a mass of labour-
power available, which will enable us to live as we
please within reasonable limits. We shall no longer
be hurried and driven by the fear of starvation,
which at present presses no less on the greater part
of men in civilized communities than it does on mere
savages. The first and most obvious necessities will
be so easily provided for in a community in which
there is no waste of labour, that we shall have time
to look round and consider what we really do want,
that can be obtained without over-taxing our ener
gies .... (XXIII, 110-111)
Because Morris found the falsely ornamental part of
modern life so "rotten to the core” he believed that the
falseness needed to be swept away before the new order of
things could be realized.
We must begin to build up the ornamental part of
life— its pleasures, bodily and mental, scientific
and artistic, social and individual— on the basis of
27
work undertaken willingly and cheerfully, with the
consciousness of benefiting ourselves and our neigh
bours by it. Such absolutely necessary work as we
should have to do would in the first place take up
but a small part of each day, and so far would not
be burdensome; but it would be a task of daily re
currence, and therefore would spoil our day's pleas
ures unless it were made at least endurable while it
lasted. In other words, all labour, even the com
monest, must be made attractive. (XXIII, 111)
Because man was a creature of many interests he
needed various tasks to keep him interested and happy.
Education could help him here.
One thing which will make this variety of employment
possible will be the form that education will take
in a socially ordered community. At present all ed
ucation is directed towards the end of fitting peo
ple to take their places in the hierarchy of com
merce— these as masters, those as workmen. The edu
cation of the masters is more ornamental than that
of the workmen, but it is commercial still; and even
at the ancient universities learning is but little
regarded, unless it can in the long run be made to
pay. Due education is a totally different thing
from this, and concerns itself in finding out what
different people are fit for, and helping them along
the road which they are inclined to take. In a duly
ordered society, therefore, young people would be
taught such handicrafts as they had a turn for as a
part of their education, the discipline of their
minds and bodies; and adults would also have oppor
tunities of learning in the same schools, for the
development of individual capacities would be of all
things chiefly aimed at by education, instead, as
now, the subordination of all capacities to the
great end of "money-making" for oneself— or one's
master. The amount of talent, and even genius,
which the present system crushes, and which would
be drawn out by such a system, would make our daily
work easy and interesting. (XXIII, 112-113)
As to that part of labour which must be associ
ated on a large scale, this very factory system,
under a reasonable order of things (though to my
mind there might still be drawbacks to it), would at
least offer opportunities for a full and eager social
life surrounded by many pleasures. The factories
28
might be the centres of intellectual activity also,
and work in them might well be varied very much: the
tending of the necessary machinery might to each in
dividual be but a short part of the day's work. The
other work might vary from raising food from the sur
rounding country to the study and practice of art and
science. It is a matter of course that people engaged
in such work, and being the masters of their own lives,
would not allow any hurry or want of foresight to
force them into enduring dirt,, disorder, or want of
room. Science duly applied would enable them to get
rid of refuse, to minimize, if not wholly to destroy,
all the inconveniences which at present attend the use
of elaborate machinery, such as smoke, stench, and
noise; nor would they endure that the buildings in
which they worked or lived should be ugly blots on the
fair face of the earth. Beginning by making their
factories, buildings, and sheds decent and convenient
like their homes, they would infallibly go on to make
them not merely negatively good, inoffensive merely,
but even beautiful, so that the glorious art of archi
tecture, now for some time slain by commercial greed,
would be born again and flourish. (XXIII, 115-116)
The creation of luxury constituted one of the great
est wastes among laborers, Morris said; so to eliminate
wasteful toil he would have nothing luxurious in his
happy state.
. . . being no longer compelled by anything but their
own needs, they would refuse to produce the mere in
anities which are now called luxuries, or the poison
and trash now called cheap wares. No one would make
plush breeches when there were no flunkies to wear
them, nor would anybody waste his time over making
oleomargarine when no one was compelled to abstain
from real butter. Adulterationlaws are only needed
in a society of thieves— and in such a society they
are a dead letter. (XXIII, 118)
Morris's answer to the question of how men would ac
complish disagreeable but necessary work in his ideal
state put great faith in man:
Socialists are often asked how work of the rougher
and more repulsive kind could be carried out in the
29
new condition of things ♦ . . . Yet it is not diffi
cult to conceive of some arrangement whereby those
who did the roughest work should work for the short
est spells. And again, what is said above of the
variety of work applies specially here. Gnce more I
say, that for a man to be the whole of his life hope
lessly engaged in performing one repulsive and never-
ending task, is an arrangement fit enough for the
hell imagined by theologians, but scarcely fit for
any other form of society. Lastly, if this rougher
work were of any special kind, we may suppose that
special volunteers would be called on to perform it,
who would surely be forthcoming, unless men in a
state of freedom should lose the sparks of manliness
which they possessed as slaves.
And yet if there b.e any work which cannot be made
other than repulsive, either by the shortness of its
duration or the intermittency of its recurrence, or
by the sense of special and peculiar usefulness (and
therefore honour) in the mind of the man who performs
it freely— if there be any work which cannot be but a
torment to the worker, what then? Well, then, let us
see if the heavens will fall on us if we leave it un
done, for it were better that they should. The pro
duce of such' work cannot be worth the price of it.
(XXIII, 118-119)
May Morris noted that most of the lectures in the
twenty-second volume of her father’s works were devoted
to the matters of changes in art and in industry; the lec
tures in the next volume were chiefly devoted to matters
of rebellion, ehange, and the problems of art and industry
under socialism. When in 1884 Morris addressed himself to
his two major subjects in a lecture called ’ ’Art and
1 3
Socialism” we expected to find rich statements of his
position. He again stressed the necessity for man’s find
ing his work pleasant and worth doing. He was seriously
concerned that man had lost his instinct for beauty in
^Collected Works, XXIII, 192-214.
30
the horrors of slavery in metropolitan slums, and he vig
orously asserted:
It is right and necessary that all men should have
work to do: First, Work worth doing; Second, Work
of itself pleasant to do; Third, Work done under
such conditions as would make it neither over-
wearisome nor over-anxious. (XXIII,209)
Morris then discussed the three necessities of mind
and body for the willing worker:
No one who is willing to work should ever fear want
of- such employment as would earn for him all due nec
essaries of mind and body. All due necessaries: what
are the due necessaries for a good citizen? First,
honourable and fitting work: which would involve
giving him a chance of gaining capacity for his work
by due education; also, as the work must be worth do
ing and pleasant to do, it will be found necessary to
this end that his position be so assured to him that
he cannot be compelled to do useless work, or work in
which he cannot take pleasure.
The second necessity is decency of surroundings:
including 1. good lodging; 2. ample space; 3* general
order and beauty. That is: 1. Our houses must be
well built, clean, and healthy. 2. There must be
abundant garden space in our towns, and our towns
must not eat up the fields and natural features of
the country; nay, I demand even that there be left
waste places and wilds in it, or romance and poetry,
that is Art, will die out amongst us. 3* Order and
beauty means that not only our houses must be stoutly
and properly built, but also that they be ornamented
duly: that the fields be not only left for cultiva
tion, but also that they be not spoilt by it any more
than a garden is spoilt: no one for instance to be
allowed to cut down, for mere profit, trees whose
loss would spoil a landscape: neither on any pretext
should people be allowed to darken the daylight with
smoke, to befoul rivers, or to degrade any spot of
earth with squalid litter and brutal wasteful dis
order.
The third necessity is leisure. You will under
stand that in using that word I imply first that all
men must work for some portion of the day, and sec
ondly that they have a positive right to claim a
respite from that work: the leisure they have a
51
right to claim must be ample enough to allow them
full rest of mind and body: a man must have time
for serious individual thought, for imagination, for
dreaming even, or the race of men will inevitably
worsen. Even of the honourable and fitting work of
which I have been speaking, which is a whole heaven
asunder from the forced work of the capitalist sys
tem, a man must not be asked to give more than his
fair share; or men will become unequally developed,
and there will still be a rotten place in society.
(XXIII, 209-210)
Having listed the conditions under which worthwhile
work could be accomplished, he wondered whether under the
obtaining capitalistic conditions his criteria could be
achieved, and he repeated, in italics:
In a properly ordered state of Society every man will
ing to work should be ensured: First, Honourable and
fitting work; Second, A healthy and beautiful home;
Third, Hull leisure for rest of mind and body.
(XXIII, 210)
Although he never lost hope that the changes in soci
ety would be toward the social state that he envisioned,
Morris, as here, sometimes grew weary with waiting for his
dreams to become real. So must his hearers, he realized,
and he offered some encouragement.
When will the time come when honest and clear-
seeing men will grow sick of all this chaos of waste,
this robbing of Peter to pay Paul, which is the es
sence of commercial war? When shall we band together
to replace the system whose motto is "The devil take
the hindmost" with a system whose motto shall be
really and without qualification "One for all and all
for one"? Who knows but the time may be at hand, but
that we now living may see the beginning of that end
which shall extinguish luxury and poverty? when the
upper, middle, and lower elasses shall have melted
into one class, living contentedly a simple and happy
life? That is a long sentence to describe the state
of things which I am asking you to help to bring about:
32
the abolition of slavery is a shorter one and means
the same thing. (XXIII, 211-212)
Frequently in his public lectures Morris described
his ideal society in terms of the medieval patterns with
which his study of history had made him familiar. In a
long lecture, which he delivered to The Society for the
" 1 4 -
Protection of Ancient Buildings, on July 1, 1884, he
described the work of a craftsman of the Middle Ages:
The mediaeval man sets to work at his own time, in
his own house; probably makes his tool, instrument,
or simple machine himself, even before he gets on to
his web, or his lump of clay, or what not. What or
nament there shall be on his finished work he himself
determines, and his mind and hand designs it and car
ries it out; tradition, that is to say the minds and
thoughts of all workmen gone before, this, in its
concrete form of the custom of his craft, does indeed
guide and help him; otherwise he is free. Hor must
we forget that even if he lives in a town, the fields
and sweet country come elose up to his house, and he
at whiles occupies himself in working in them, and
more than once or twice in his life he has had to
take bow or brown-fill from the wall, and run his
chance of meeting the great secret face to face in
the ranks of battle; oftenest, indeed, in other men’s
j quarrels, yet sometimes in his own, nor wholly unsuc
cessfully then. (XXII, 312)
In a lecture called ”At a Picture Show, 1884”^ [sic]
Morris discussed freedom and the basis of exchange in his
ideal commonweal wherein men worked only for the benefit
of one another and avoided civil strife.
Prom that slavery of the world-market, the mother of
lies and theft, of pestilence, war and famine, the
worker must free himself if he is ever to take any
^ ’ ’ Architecture and History,” Collected Works, XXII,
296-317.
_____ ^Supplement II, 406-419.______________________________
35
part again in the enjoyment and production of beauty;
and if he does not then beauty will die out of the
life of man. The workman must learn to understand
that he must have no master no employer save himself
— himself collectively, that is to say, the common
weal: then once more he will be master of his work
and refuse to produce at the command of the gambling-
market: he will have no more need to send his son or
his brother equipped with all the newest inventions
of science to murder half-armed men in distant coun
tries that he may sell another thousand yards of cali
co : he will think the slaughter of three or four
thousand Arabs or negroes a wasteful if not a cruel
way of testing the capabilities of the market, and
will soberly try to find out what is wanted without
resorting to vicarious murder. He will see to it
that buying and selling shall mean nothing more in
tricate and exciting than the exchange of the results
of labour without waste; he will not suffer the ca
price of a few rich people driving them to crave for
useless and harmful luxuries to impose a tax on all
usefully industrious persons; and he will find amidst
his peaceful and useful work that every stroke he
does will benefit both himself and all his neighbours.
(Supplement II, 418-419)
Morris's most frequent method of describing his ideal
state was to set forth the practices of his own day in
contrast to those conditions he imagined as existing in
the society for which he hoped and for which he never
ceased working. During 1884 when (May Morris said) he
gave forty lectures throughout the British Isles, he fre
quently stated his hopes for the future society of men and
described the fears that he had for society if it contin
ued as it was in 1884 with the rich becoming richer and
the poor finding their lot increasingly difficult unless
they could (under the then existing state of things) be
come masters and rob the laborers whom they hired. A rev-
olutionary like Morris did not want a sudden change, as he
34
frequently said, but he wanted to keep alive hope for the
many oppressed people and give fear to the few oppressors
by bringing about a gradual change. Socialism, he be
lieved, was the system which could offer hope to the work
men, the people to whom most of his lectures on socialism
were addressed.
. . . it can offer you peace and friendship instead
of war. We might live utterly without national rival
ries, acknowledging that while it is best for those
who feel that they naturally form a community under
one name to govern themselves, yet that no community
in civilization should feel that it had interests op
posed to any other, their economical condition being
at any rate similar; so that any citizen of one com
munity could fall to work and live without disturb
ance of his life when he was in a foreign country, and
would fit into his place quite naturally; so that all
civilized nations would form one great community,
agreeing together as to the kind and amount of produc-
[ tion and distribution needed; working at such and such
production where it could be best produced; avoiding
waste by all means.16
Always convinced that in every civilized country
enough wealth existed for all if nothing were wasted, Mor
ris stated the conditions wherein no waste existed, and
under which all people could live without fear or want.
What is it that I need, therefore, which my sur
rounding circumstances can give me— my dealings with
my fellowmen— setting aside inevitable accidents which
co-operation and forethought cannot control, if there
be such?
Well, first of all I claim good health; and I say
i that a vast proportion of people in civilization
j scarcely even know what that means, Io feel mere
life a pleasure; to enjoy the moving one’s limbs and
exercising one’s bodily powers; to play, as it were,
1
• ’ How We live and How We Might Live," Collected
Works, XXIII, 7.
35
with sun and wind and rain; to rejoice in satisfying
the due bodily appetites of a human animal without
fear of degradation or sense of wrong-doing; yes, and
therewithal to be well-formed, straight-limbed,
strongly knit, expressive of countenance— to be, in
a word, beautiful— that also I claim. If we cannot
have this claim satisfied, we are but poor creatures
after all; and I claim it in the teeth of those ter
rible doctrines of asceticism, which, born of the
despair of the oppressed and degraded, have been for
so many ages used as instruments for the continuance
of that oppression and degradation.
And I believe that this claim for a healthy body
for all of us carries with it all other due claims:
for who knows where the seeds of disease which even
rich people suffer from were first sown: from the
luxury of an ancestor, perhaps; yet often, I suspect,
from his poverty. And for the poor: a distinguished
physicist has said that the poor suffer always from
one disease— hunger; and at least I know this, that
if a man is overworked in any degree he cannot enjoy
the sort of health I am speaking of; nor can he if
he is continually chained to one dull round of mechan
ical work, with no hope at the other end of it; nor
if he lives in continual sordid anxiety for his live
lihood, nor if he is ill-housed, nor if he is deprived
of all enjoyment of the natural beauty of the world,
nor if he has no amusement to quicken the flow of his
spirits from time to time: all these things, which
touch more or less directly on his bodily condition,
are born of the claim I make to live in good health.
(XXIII, 16-17)
This is the only instance in which Morris mentioned at any
length in his lectures the physical health of workingmen
as necessary for the better state. Much more frequently
he mentioned the desire for good education in his happy
state. In this lecture he considered good education as
the second characteristic after good health:
Now the next thing I claim is education. And you
must not say that every English child is educated
now; that sort of education will not answer my claim,
though I cheerfully admit it is something; something,
and yet after all only class education. What I claim
is liberal education; opportunity, that is to have my
36
share of whatever knowledge there is in the world ac
cording to my capacity or bent of mind, historical or
scientific; and also to have my share of skill of
hand which is about in the world, either in the in
dustrial handicrafts or in the fine arts; picture-
painting, sculpture, music, acting, or the like: I
claim to be taught, if I can be taught, more than one
craft to exercise for the benefit of the community.
You may think this a large claim, but I am clear it
is not too large a claim if the community is to have
any gain out of my special capacities, if we are not
all to be beaten down to a dull level of mediocrity
as we are now, all but the very strongest and tough
est of us.
But also I know that this claim for education in
volves one for public advantages in the shape of pub
lic libraries, schools, and the like, such as no pri
vate person, not even the richest, could command:
but these I claim very confidently, being sure that
no reasonable community could bear to be without such
helps to a decent life.
Again, the claim for education involves a claim
for abundant leisure, which once more I make with
confidence; because when once we have shaken off the
slavery of profit, labour would be organized so un-
wastefully that no heavy burden would be laid on the
individual citizens; every one of whom as a matter
of course would have to pay his toll of some obvious
ly useful work. (XXIII, 18-19)
Before going on to the third characteristic that he
desired for the improvement of society, Morris mentioned
here the use of machines that he desired. Since abundant
leisure was necessary in his scheme, and since there were
many tasks which needed to be done but which most men
would find disagreeable, he would use machinery to ease
men's burdens, to perform the disagreeable tasks so that
more human leisure would be possible.
But under a happier state of things they jmachinesj
would be used simply for saving labour, with the re
sult of a vast amount of leisure gained for the com
munity to be added to that gained by the avoidance
of the waste of useless luxury, and the abolition of
37
the service of commercial war. (XXIII, 19)
Again, if the necessary reasonable work be of a
mechanical kind, I must be helped to do it by a ma
chine, not to cheapen my labour, but so that as lit
tle time as possible may be spent upon it, and that
I may be able to think of other things while I am
tending the machine. And if the work be specially
rough or exhausting, you will, I am sure, agree with
me in saying that I must take turns in doing it with
other people; I mean I mustn’t, for instance, be ex
pected to spend my working hours always at the bottom
of a coal-pit. I think such work as that ought to be
largely volunteer work, and done, as I say, in spells.
And what I say of very rough work I say also of nasty
work. On the other hand, I should think very little
of the manhood of a stout and healthy man who did not
feel a pleasure in doing rough work; always supposing
him to work under the conditions I have been speaking
of . . . . (XXIII, 20-21)
He then went directly to his third characteristic,
in this lecture, man's obligation to perform those tasks
for his society which his capabilities made possible.
Idlers had no place in Morris's state, but the human weak
ness of idleness he did not even consider, feeling sure
that all men would assume their reasonable obligations to
work.
But now, in order that my leisure might not degen-J
erate into idleness and aimlessness, I must set up a
claim for due work to do. Nothing to my mind is more
important than this demand, that I do my due share
of what my capacity enables me to do, that is; no
fitting of me to a Procrustean bed; but even that
share of work necessary to the existence of the sim
plest social life must, in the first place, whatever
else it is, be reasonable work; that is, it must be
such work as a good citizen can see the necessity
for; as a member of the community, I must have agreed
to do it. (XXIII, 20)
That man should live in a beautiful if simple dwell
ing in a garden setting was a commonplace with Morris,
38
tout he seemed to expect some differences with his audience
of 1884 when he suggested communal living. This was the
first time that he suggested communal living for the
dwellers in his utopia.
As to what extent it may toe necessary or desirable
for people under social order to live in common, we
may differ pretty much according to our tendencies
towards social life. For my part I can't see why we
should think it a hardship to eat with the people we
work with; I am sure that as to many things, such as
valuable books, pictures, and splendour of surround
ings, we shall find it better to club our means to
gether; . . . I console myself with visions of the
noble communal hall of the future, unsparing of ma
terials, generous in worthy ornament, alive with the
noblest thoughts of our time, and the past, embodied
in the best art which a free and manly people could
produce; such an abode of man as no private enter
prise could come anywhere near for beauty and fitness,
because only collective thought and collective life
could cherish the aspirations which would give birth
to its beauty, or have the skill and leisure to carry
them out. (XXIII, 22-23)
In his lecture called "Art and Democracy" Morris
struck at the "bourgeois ideal" of a class society. In
the single lecture that is preserved from the year 1885,
1 7
called "The Hopes of Civilization," he traced in great
detail the history of man's social development from an
cient times and discussed the work of the Chartists,
Robert Owen, St. Simon, Proudhon, Fourier, and Marx in
the development of socialistic ideas; he saw some hope in
the fact that no new privileged class seemed emergent,
but he feared the overpowering influence of the men of
property:
1 Collected Works. XXIII. 39-80
39
Now it is just this growing consciousness of the
fact that as long as there exists in society a prop
ertied class living on the labour of a propertyless
one, there must be a struggle always going on between
those two classes— it is just the dawning knowledge
of this fact which should show us what civilization
can hope for— namely, transformation into true soci
ety, in which there will no longer be classes with
their necessary struggle for existence and superi
ority. . . . (XXIII, 75)
In this lecture he said for the first time what he
was to reiterate in future discussions, that "Socialism"
summed up his hopes for the future.
Socialism, the hope of which is ever growing clearer
in men's minds— a system which not only sees how la
bour can be freed from its present fetters, and or
ganized unwastefully, so as to produce the greatest
possible amount of wealth for the community and for
every member of it, but which bears with it its own
ethics and religion and aesthetics: that is the
hope and promise of a new and higher life in all
ways. (XXIII, 80)
In "The Aims of Art" (1886) Morris again stressed the
importance of art in the lives of all people and stated
that if art were a part of everyone's life, then everyone
i
would be happy and produce usefully.
I have said as much as that the aim of art was to
destroy the curse of labour by making work the pleas
urable satisfaction of our impulse towards energy,
and giving to that energy hope of producing some
thing worth its exercise.18
Happiness, however, was the chief theme of the lec-
Iture and could be achieved only by men's finding pleasur
able work and devoting themselves to it; their work should
1 Collected Works. XXIII, 91.
40
be varied and constantly attractive.
They will discover, or rediscover rather, that the
true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine
interest in all the details of daily life, in eleva-
ting them by art instead of handing the performance
of them over-to unregarded drudges, and ignoring them;
and .that in cases where it was impossible either so
to elevate them and make them interesting, or to
lighten them by the use of machinery, so as to make
the labour of them trifling, that should be taken as
a token that the supposed advantages gained by them
were not worth the trouble and had better be given up.
(XXIII, 94)
In 1886 Morris summarized the social ideal for which
he hoped in his new society. He proceeded first to con
trast democracy to what is desired.
Democracy said and says, men shall not be the masters
of others because hereditary privilege has made a
race or a family so, and they happen to belong to
such raee; they shall individually grow into being
the masters of others by the development of certain
qualities under a system of authority which artifi
cially protects the wealth of every man, if he has
acquired it in accordance with this artificial sys
tem, from the interference of every other, or from
all others combined.
The new order of things says, on the contrary, why
have masters at all? let us be fellows working in the
harmony of association for the common good, that is,
for the greatest happiness and completest development
of every human being in the community.
This ideal and hope of a new society founded on in
dustrial peace and forethought, bearing with it its
own ethics, aiming at a new and higher life for all
men, has received the general name of Socialism, and
it is my firm belief that it is destined to supersede
the old order of things founded on industrial war. and
to be the next step in the progress of humanity.” 1?
Continuing the contrast, Morris proceeded to discuss
the ideal social order, which he hoped would supersede
^ The Dawn of a Hew Epoch,'1 Collected Works, XXIII,
123.
41
the obtaining "slave system" of 1886.
Now this power to compel others to live poorly
Socialism would abolish entirely, and in that sense
would make an end of private property: nor would
it need to make laws to prevent accumulation arti
ficially when once people had found out that they
could employ themselves, and that thereby every man
could enjoy the results of his own labour ....
(XXIII, 135)
Morris then made clear how he thought labor should
be rewarded.
A few words now as to the differentiation of re
ward of labour, as I know my readers are sure to
want an exposition of the Socialist views here as
to those who direct labour or who have specially ex
cellent faculties towards production. And, first, I
will look on the super-excellent workman as an arti
cle presumably needed by the community; and then say
that, as with other articles so with this, the com
munity must pay the cost of his production: for in
stance, it will have to seek him out, to develop his
special capacities, and satisfy any needs he may have
(if any) beyond those of an average man, so long as
the satisfaction of those needs is not hurtful to the
community.
Furthermore, you cannot give him more than he can
use, so he will not ask for more, and will not take
it: it is true that his work may be more special
than another's, but not more necessary if you have
organized labour properly; the ploughman and the
fisherman are as necessary to society as the scien
tist or the artist, I will not say more necessary:
neither is the difficulty of producing the more spe
cial and excellent work at all proportionate to its
speciality or excellence: the higher workman pro
duces his work as easily perhaps as the lower does
his work; if he does not do so, you must give him
extra leisure, extra means for supplying the waste
of power in him, but you can give him nothing more.
The only reward that you can give the excellent work
man is the opportunity for developing and exercising
his excellent capacity. I repeat, you can give him
nothing more worth his having: all other rewards
are either illusory or harmful. (XXIII, 136-137)
Morris said at the end of this lecture that "this
42
complete Socialism” was what he meant by Communism (XXIII,
140). The latter was Socialism after it had realized its
ideal and no longer had to struggle with capitalistic
practices that robbed men of freedom and the leisure to
practice art in a beautiful home.
The honest society which Morris had discussed in "At
a Picture Show, 1884” he reviewed in a lecture called "The
20
End and the Means,” which May Morris said he gave first
in 1886. An honest society, Morris thought, would strive
to make each member happy by developing each person's best
qualities.
This then is the end which I propose to you, a soci
ety whose basis is honesty: nor can you have such a
society without a sense growing up in you of your
unity with humanity; of that corporation you will
feel yourself a member, and you will shrink from do
ing anything which may be an offence against it.
Now what are the conditions of an honest society?
Surely to start with that every member of it should
have a chance of a happy life, that is of a life
which will develop his human faculties to the utmost,
a chance which only his own will and not the will of
anyone else can take away from him: and in order to
have that chance he must be allowed to enjoy the
fruits of his own labour; in which case he need have
no fear for his livelihood, since every person not
too young and not too old for productive work or not
sick can produce more than is necessary for his own
subsistence ....
Let us again then look at the end: it is a Com
munity striving for the happiness of the human race:
each man striving for the happiness of the whole and
therefore for his own through the whole. Surely
such a community would develop the best qualities of
man, and make such a world of it as it is difficult
to conceive of now: a world in which sordid fear
would be unknown and in which permanent injustice
20
Supplement II, 420-434.
43
defended by authority would not exist, and in which
acts of wrong would be but the result of sudden out
bursts of passion repented of by the actors, ac
knowledged as wrongs by all. (Supplement II, 433-434)
More characteristics of the ideal society were dis
cussed in Morris’s 1887 lecture called ’ ’True and False
21
Society” than in any before that date. He was approach
ing, in this lecture, his final thinking on the matter
!
with which this dissertation is concerned. He looked
deeply into history to discover what mistakes men had
made that resulted in the social situation of 1887 when
society was confronted with the difficult continuation of
’ ’slave and serf societies,” with the baffling paradox that
he had been trying so long to disentangle: "... the man
of leisureless toil lived miserably, the man who did noth
ing useful lived abundantly" (XXIII, 219).
The "true society," as he frequently called the
future state to which he looked forward, he described
with many attending problems in rather full detail. *
He began by describing what a successful society did:
I will assert, then, that a successful society— a
society which fulfilled its true functions— would
take care that each did his due share of labour,
that each had his due share of wealth resulting from
that labour, and that the labour of persons general
ly was not wasted. (XXIII, 216-217)
Morris then set down the principles on which his new
society would be founded:
Collected Works. XXIII, 215-237.
44
I told you that I was not prepared to give you any
details of the arrangement of a new state of society;
hut I am prepared to state the principles on which it
would he founded, and the recognition of which would
make it easy for serious men to deal with the details
of arrangement. Socialism asserts that everyone
should have free access to the means of production of
wealth— the raw material and the stored-up force pro
duced hy labour; in other words, the land, plant and
stock of the community, which are now monopolized hy
certain privileged persons, who force others to pay
for their use. This claim is founded on the princi
ple which lies at the bottom of Socialism, that the
right to the possession of wealth is conferred hy the
possessor having worked towards its production, and
being able to use it for the satisfaction of his per
sonal needs. (XXIII, 230-231)
But the principle once granted that each man should
have his due share of what he has created hy his
labour, the solution of the difficulty would he at
tempted, nay, is now hypothetically attempted, in
various ways— in two ways mainly. One view is that
the State— that is, society organized for the produc
tion and distribution of wealth— would hold all the
means of the production and distribution of wealth in
its hands, allowing the use of them to whomsoever [sic]
it thought could use them, charging rent, perhaps, for
their use, but which rent would be used again only for
the benefit of the whole community, and therefore
would return to the worker in another form. It would
also take on itself the organization of labour in de
tail, arranging the how, when, and where for the ben
efit of the public; doing all this, one must hope,
with as little centralization as possible; in short,
the State, according to this view, would be the only
employer of labour. . . . Thus society would be
changed. Everyone would have to work for his liveli
hood, and everybody would be able to do so, whereas
at present there are people who refuse to work for
their livelihood and forbid others to do so. Labour
would not be wasted, as there would be no competing
employers gambling in the market and using the real
producer and the consumer as their milch cows. The
limit of price would be the cost of production, so
that buying and selling would be simply the exchange
of equivalent values, and there would be no loss on
either side in the transaction. Thus there would be
a society in which everyone would have an equal
chance for well-doing, for, as a matter of course, ar
rangements would be made for the sustaining of people
45
in their nonage, for keeping them in comfort if they
were physically incapacitated from working, and also
for educating everyone according to his capacities.
(XXIII, 232-233)
At this point Morris specified two characteristics
of the "true community": all work should he necessary
work so none would he wasted; all wealth would he held hy
the community rather than hy any individual.
In a properly orderedcommunity, all work that is done
is necessary on the:one hand, and on the other there
would he plenty of wealth in such a community to sat
isfy all reasonable needs. The community holds all
wealth in common, hut has the same right to holding
wealth that the individual has, namely, the fact that
it has created it and uses it; but as a community it
can only use wealth hy satisfying with it the needs
of every one of its members— it is not a true commu
nity if it does less than this. . . . (XXIII, 233)
A happy life Morris thought to he reward enough for
the people of his true community, whose citizens would
not want to he rewarded with leisure or with some kind of
social security. Morris asked only that a society provide
opportunities for the development of its citizens' special
abilities.
. . . in a state of society in which all were well-to-
do, how could you reward extra services to the com
munity? Give your good worker immunity from work?
The question carries with it the condemnation of the
idea, and, moreover, that will he the last thing he
will thank you for. Provide for his children? The
fact that they are human beings with a capacity for
work is enough; they are provided for in being mem
bers of a community which will see that they neither
lack work nor wealth. Give him more wealth? Way,
what for? What can he do with more than he can use?
He cannot eat three dinners a day, or sleep in four
beds. Give him domination over other men? Nay, if
he he more excellent than they are in any art, he
must influence them for his good and theirs if they
46
are worth anything; hut if you make him their arbi
trary master, he will govern them, but he will not
influence them; he and they will be enemies, and
harm each other mutually. One reward you can give
him, that is, opportunity for developing his special
capacity; but that you will do for everybody, and
not the excellent only. Indeed, I suppose he will
not, if he be excellent, lack the admiration, or per
haps it is better to say the affection, of his fellow
men, and he will be all the more likely to get that
when the relations between him and them are no longer
clouded by the fatal gift of mastership. (XXIII, 234-
235)
In this lecture Morris advocated a federation of com
munes rather than any kind of centralized government,
which he feared. In The House of the Wolfings he was
later to describe the operation of a communal society.
. . . those who see this view of the new society be
lieve that decentralization in it would have to be
complete. The political unit with them is not a
Nation, but a Commune; the whole of reasonable soci
ety would be a great federation of such communes,
federated for definite purposes of the organization
of livelihood and exchange. For a mere nation is
the historical deduction from the ancient tribal
family in which there was peace between the individ
uals composing it and war with the rest of the world.
(XXIII, 235)
Morris then summarized the two points of view, the
socialistic and the communistic, that he had offered in
this lecture. For him no opposition existed in the two
viewpoints. He said often that communism was the order
of society that would grow out of socialism.
I will recapitulate, then, the two views taken
among Socialists as to the future of society. Accord
ing to the first, the State— that is, the nation or
ganized for unwasteful production and exchange of
wealth— will be the sole possessor of the national
plant and stock, the whole employer of labour, which
she will so regulate in the general interest that no
47
man will ever need to fear lack of employment and due
earnings therefrom. Everybody will have an equal
chance of livelihood, and, except as a rare disease,
there would be no hoarding of money or other wealth.
This view points to an attempt to give everybody the
full worth of the productive work done by him, after
having ensured the necessary preliminary that he
shall always be free to work.
According to the other view, the centralized na
tion would give place to a federation of communities
who would hold all wealth in common, and would use
that wealth, for satisfying the needs of each member,
only extracting from each that he should do his best
according to his capacity towards the production of
the common wealth. Of course, it is to be under
stood that each member is absolutely free to use his
share of wealth as he pleases, without interference
from any, so long as he really uses it, that is,
does not turn it into an instrument for the oppres
sion of others. This view intends complete equality
of condition for everyone, though life would be, as
always, varied by the differences of capacity and
disposition; and emulation in working for the common
good would supply the place of competition as an
incentive.
These two views of the future of society are some
times opposed to each other as Socialism and Commu
nism, but to my mind the latter is simply the neces
sary development of the former, which implies a tran
sition period during which people would be getting
rid of the habits of mind bred by the long ages of
tyranny and commercial competition, and be learning
that it is to the interest of each that all should
thrive. (XXIII, 235-236)
In another lecture of the year 1887* "Art and Indus-
22
try in the Fourteenth Century,*' Morris used his remark
ably detailed knowledge of medieval history to describe
communal life five hundred years before his.own day. He
equated the pre-Renaissance guilds with the communes of
his ideal society, and described a typical "industry” of
the older time'i
^Collected Works, XXII, 375-390.
48
No master to employ more than three journeymen in his
workshop: no one under any pretence to have more than
one workshop: the wages fixed per day, and the number
of hours also: no work to be done on holidays. If
piecework (which was allowed), the priee per yard
fixed: but only so much and no more to be done in a
day. No one allowed to buy wool privately, but at
open sales duly announced. No mixing of wools al
lowed; the man who uses English wool (the best) not
to have any other on his premises. English and other
foreign cloth not allowed to be sold. Workmen not be
longing to the commune not admitted unless hands fell
short. Most of these rules and many others may be
considered to have been made in the direct interest
of the workmen ....
Now you will see that the accumulation of capital
is impossible under such regulations as this, and it
was meant to be impossible. The theory of industry
among these communes was something like this. There
is a certain demand for the goods which we can make,
and a certain settled population to make them: if
the goods are not thoroughly satisfactory we shall
lose our market for them and be ruined: we must
therefore keep up their quality to the utmost. Fur
thermore, the work to be done must be shared amongst
the whole of those who can do it, who must be sure
of work always as long as they are well behaved and
industrious, and also must have a fair livelihood
and plenty of leisure; as why should they not?
(XXII, 385-386)
The similarity between the three-loom home industry
of the fourteenth century and the home workshop that Mor
ris desired in his ideal social state is worthy of note
here because further similarities will be apparent in the
discussion of the prose romances.
One might well expect that the lecture entitled "The
Society of the Future" (1888)"^ would provide many char
acteristics of Morris's ideal society. It did, and began
with a discussion of the results that socialism should
"^Supplement II, 453-468.
49
tiring. “The realization of Socialism, ” he said,
. . . will tend to make men happy. What is it then
makes people happy? Free and full life and the con
sciousness of life. Or, if you will, the pleasurable
exercise of our energies, and the enjoyment of the
rest which that exercise or expenditure of energy
makes necessary to us. I think that is happiness for
all, and covers all difference of capacity and temper
ament from the most energetic to the laziest. (Supple
ment II, 456)
Morris then listed and discussed his ideals of the
society for which he hoped. Freedom, of course, was
first.
. . . my ideal of the Society of the future is first
of all the freedom and cultivation of the individual
will, which civilization ignores, or even denies the
existence of; the shaking off the slavish dependence,
not on other men, hut on artificial systems made to
save men manly trouble and responsibility: and in
order that this will may be vigorous in us, I demand
a free and unfettered animal life for man first of
all: I demand the utter extinction of all asceti
cism. If we feel the least degradation in being
amorous, or merry, or hungry, or sleepy, we are so
far bad animals, and therefore miserable men. (Supple
ment II, 457)
So, then, my ideal is first unconstrained life,
and next simple and natural life. First you must be
free; and next you must learn to take pleasure in
all the details of life: which, indeed, will be nec
essary for you, because, since others will be free,
you will have to do your own work. (Supplement II, 459)
After freedom he described the political "organiza
tion” of his new society, and then went on to occupations
and the use of machinery.
. . . as to the form of the position of people in the
new Society— their political position, so to say.
Political society as we know it will have come to an
end: the relations between man and man will no
longer be that of status or of property. It will no
longer be the hierarchical position, the office of
50
the man, that will be considered, as in the Middle
Ages, nor his property as now, but his person. Con
tract enforced by_the State will have vanished into
the same limbo as the holiness of the nobility of
blood. So we shall at one stroke get rid of all
that side of artificiality which bids us sacrifice
each our own life to the supposed necessity of an
institution which is to take care of the troubles of
people which may never happen; every case of clash
ing rights and desires will be dealt with on its own
merits— that is, really, and not legally. Private
property of course will not exist as a right; there
will be such an abundance of all ordinary necessaries
that between private persons there will be no obvious
and immediate exchange necessary; though no one will
want to meddle with matters that have as it were
grown to such and such an individual— which have be
come part of his habits, so to say.
how, as to occupations, we shall clearly not be
able to have the same division of labour in them as
now; vicarious servanting, sewer-emptying, butcher
ing, letter-carrying, boot-blacking, hair-dressing,
and the rest of it, will have come to an end; we
shall either make all these occupations agreeable to
ourselves in some mood or to some minds, who will
take to them voluntarily, or we shall have to let
them lapse altogether. A great many fidgety occupa
tions will come to an end; we shan't put a pattern
on a cloth or a twiddle on a jug-handle to sell it,
but to make it prettier and to amuse ourselves and
others. Whatever rough or inferior wares we make,
will be made rough and inferior to perform certain
functions of use, and not to sell; as there will be
no slaves, there will be no use for wares which none
but slaves would need. Machinery will probably to a
great extent have served its purpose in allowing the
workers to shake off privilege, and will I believe
be much curtailed. Possibly the few more important
machines will be very much improved, and the host of
unimportant ones fall into disuse; and as to many or
most of them, people will be able to use them or not
as they feel inclined— as, e.g., if we want to go a
journey we shall not be compelled to go by railway
as we are now, in the interests of property, but may
indulge our personal inclinations and travel in a
tilted waggon or on the hindquarters of a donkey.
(Supplement II, 460-461)
By "education" Morris meant not the development
of one's intellectual powers but training in practical
51
matters. He nowhere mentioned the need for institutions
that developed people through a long process of education.
All people should learn how to swim, and to ride, and
to sail a boat on sea or river; such things are not
arts, they are merely bodily exercises, and should
become habitual in the race; and also one or two ele
mentary arts of life, as carpentry or smithying; and
most should know how to shoe a horse and shear a
sheep and reap a field and plough it (we should soon
drop machinery in agriculture I believe when we were
free). Then again there are things like cooking and
baking, sewing, and the like, which can be taught to
every sensible person in a few hours, and which
everybody ought to have at his fingers* end. All
these elementary arts would be once again habitual,
as also I suppose would be the arts of reading and
writing; as also I suspect would the art of thinking,
at present not taught in any school or university
that I know of.
Well, armed with these habits and arts, life would
lie before the citizen for him to enjoy; for whatever
line he might like to take up for the exercise of his
energies, he would find the community ready to help
him with teaching, opportunities, and material. Nor
for my part would I prescribe for him what he should
do, being persuaded that the habits which would have
given him the capacities of a man would stimulate
him to use them; and that the process of the enjoy
ment of his life would be carried out, not at the ex
pense of his fellow-eitizens, but for their benefit.
At present, you know, the gains held out as a stimu
lus to exertion, to all those who are not stimulated
by the whip of the threat of death by starvation,
are narrow, and are mainly the hope that the success
fully energetic man shall be placed in a position
where he shall not have to exercise his energies:
the boredom of satiety, in short, is the crown of
valiant exertion in civilization. But in a social
condition of things, the gains that would lie before
the exercise of one's energies would be various and
wide indeed .... (Supplement II, 462-463)
Morris then summarized his hopes for the society of
the futuref
It is a society which does not know the meaning of
the words rich and poor, or the rights of property or
law, or legality or nationality: a society which has
52
no consciousness of being governed; in which equality
of condition is a matter of course, and in which no
man is rewarded for having served the community by
having the power to injure it.
It is a society conscious of a wish to keep life
simple, to forgo some of the power over nature won
by past ages in order to be more human and less me
chanical, and willing to sacrifice something to this
end. It would be divided into small communities
varying much within the limits allowed by due social
ethics, but without rivalry between each other, look
ing with abhorrence at the idea of a holy race.
Being determined to be free, and therefore con
tented with a life not only simpler but even rougher
than the life of slave-owners, division of labour
would be habitually limited: men (and women too, of
course) would do their work and take their pleasure
in their own persons, and not vicariously: the
social bond would be habitally [sic] and instinctive
ly felt, so that there would be no need to be always
asserting it by set forms: the family of blood re
lationship would melt into that of the community and
of humanity. The pleasures of such a society would
be founded on the free exercises of the senses and
passions of a healthy human animal, so far as this
did not injure the other individuals of the commu
nity and so offend against social unity: no one
would be ashamed of humanity or ask for anything bet
ter than its due development.
But from this healthy freedom would spring up the
pleasures of intellectual development, which the men
of civilization so foolishly try to separate from
sensuousl;life, and to glorify at its expense. Men
would follow knowledge and the creation of beauty
for their own sakes, and not for the enslavement of
their fellows, and they would be rewarded.by finding
their most necessary work grow interesting and beau
tiful under their hands without their being con
scious of it. The man who felt keenest the pleasure
of lying on the hill-side under a rushen hut among
the sheep on a summer night, would be no less fit
for the enjoyment of the great communal hall with
all its splendors of arch and column, and vault and
tracery. Nor would he who took to heart the piping
of the wind and washing of the waves as he sat at
the helm of the fishing boat, be deadened to the
beauty of art-made music. It is workmen only and
not pedants who can produce real vigorous art.
And amidst this pleasing labour, and the rest
that went with it, would disappear from the earth's
face all the traces of the past slavery. Being no
53
longer driven to death by anxiety and fear, we should
have time to avoid disgracing the earth with filth
and squalor, and accidental ugliness would disappear
along with that which.was the mere birth of fantastic
perversity. (Supplement II, 466-4-67)
In 1892 Morris gave one of his last public lectures,
24
this one entitled simply "Communism. " G-radually he had
come to associate his ideal state with ideal Socialism or
25
Communism, and this late lecture shows the high hopes
he had still for society although the possibility of see
ing his dreams materialize was slight. In this lecture
he summarized much of what he had said in earlier lec
tures. For Morris socialism was the revolutionary proc
ess of change to the ideal state, which he called Commu
nism. In this lecture he first outlined the necessity
for the communal ownership of property so that all people
could have their basic wants satisfied.
The Communist asserts in the first place that the
resources of nature, . mainly the land and those other
things which can only be 'used for the reproduction
of wealth and which are the effect of social work,
should not be owned in severalty, but by the whole
community for the benefit of the whole. . . . Ihe
resources of nature therefore, and the wealth used
for the production of further wealth, the plant and
stock, in short, should be communized. Now if that
were done it would at once check the accumulation of
riches. No man can become immensely rich by the
storing up of wealth which is the result of labour
^ Collected Works, XXIII, 264-276.
25
. . . between complete Socialism and Communism
there is no difference whatever in my mind. Communism is,
in fact, the completion of Socialism: when that ceases
to be militant and becomes triumphant, it will be Commu
nism. (XXIII, 271)____________________________________________
r
54
of his own brain and hands . . . there would he no
very rich men: and all would be well off: all would
be far above the condition of satisfaction of their
material necessities. (XXIII, 271)
Morris dwelt at length on the problem of wasteful
ness, which was a "causeless destruction of raw material”
and the "diverting of labour from useful production" for
the purposes of profit for the owners and masters in a
competitive system. His equalitarian society would pro
duce only what was needed and so waste no raw materials
or labor.
Anticipating criticism for his socialistic system,
Morris described how it would work aboard a ship, where
equalitarianism was not practiced in 1872.
An anti-socialist will say, How will you sail a
ship in a socialist condition? How? Why with a cap
tain and mates and sailing-master and engineer (if it
be a steamer) and A.B.s [sic] and stokers and so on
and so on. Only there will be no 1st 2nd and 3rd
class among the passengers: the sailors and stokers
will be as well fed and lodged as the captain or pas
sengers; and the captain and the stoker will have the
same pay.
There are plenty of enterprises that will be car
ried on then, as they are now (and probably must be,
to be successful), under the guidance of one man.
The only difference between then and now will be,
that he will be chosen because he is fit for the work,
and not because he must have a job found for him; and
that he will do his work for the benefit of each and
all, and not for the sake of making a profit. (XXIII,
275-276)
May Morris printed, as one of the last public lec
tures which her father gave, "Makeshift” (1894), which he
55
delivered to the Aneoats Brotherhood of Manchester.
Morris, the indefatigable rebel, continued here, within
two years of the end of his life, to plead for change.
By "makeshift*1 Morris meant those substandard things
that his contemporaries put up with such as poor bread,
oleomargarine, cheap clothes, poor steel in cutlery, and
ugly houses. Even the towns were makeshifts for the real
dwelling places that man, Morris said, should want to se
cure for himself.
. . . contrast such monstrosities of haphazard growth
as your Manchester-Salford-Oldham etc., or our great
sprawling brick and mortar country of London, with
what a city might be; the centre with its big public
buildings, theatres, squares and gardens: the zone
around the centre with its lesser gildhalls grouping
together the houses of the citizens; again with its
parks and gardens; the outer zone again, still its
district of public buildings, but with no definite
gardens to it because the whole of this outer zone
would be a garden thickly besprinkled with houses
and other buildings. And at last the suburb proper,
mostly fields and fruit gardens with scanty houses
dotted about till you come to the open country with
its occasional farm-steads. There would be a city
for you. (Supplement II, 474-475)
Morris found that the one thing made in England which
was not makeshift was the machinery for waging war. This
saddehed him as much as did the quality of education.
. . . if we grudge for sake of cost making our national
education as good for the passing hour as we can make
it, we had better give up any claim that we have ever
made to be a commonsense or practical people. It
seems to me it comes to this; say you have determined
to do something for >£50,000 and you find that in or
der to do it properly you must spend another >£10,000;
^Supplement II, 469-483.
56
that in fact you will spoil your work unless you
spend it; wouldn't it he very much cheaper to spend
.£60,000 in doing it than 50,000 in not doing it?
That is the way we should treat this matter of na
tional education, it seems to me, i.e., determine
to make it as decent an education as we know how
whatever the cost may he. It will not he too good
even then perhaps; hut at least let us hegin hy dis
carding the foolish idea that we teach people in or
der to fit them to become workmen and women desir
able to he employed hy the capitalists: we should
teach them with aim in view, to make their lives
pleasanter to them: any other aim will result in
deplorable makeshift. (Supplement II, 477-478)
The last words of "Makeshift" were a brief summary of
his long struggle toward his ideal state:
let us take care that our present struggle leaves be
hind it no class distinction, hut brings about one
condition of equality for all; which condition of
society is the only one which can draw out to the
full the varying capacities of the citizens and make
the most of .the knowledge and skill of mankind, the
gain of so many ages, and thus do away forever with
MAKESHIFT. (Supplement II, 483)
The following account of the characteristics of Wil
liam Morris's ideal human society recapitulates what this
study has presented concerning his lectures on art and
socialism, 1877-1894.
1. Freedom
The basic, underlying characteristic of Morris's
ideal human society was freedom. Throughout his lectures
one finds such statements as, "So, then, my ideal is first
unconstrained life . . . ." "What is it then makes people;
happy? Free and full life and the consciousness of life."
, my ideal of the society of the future is first of
all the freedom and cultivation of the individual will."
57
". . .1 demand a free and unfettered animal life for man
first of all . . . ."
"Freedom,” of course, had many meanings for Morris.
All people, he believed, should be free to work at the
tasks which pleased them most. A man might have one job
which allowed him to support his family and which gave
him some security, but he stayed at that job only as long
as he liked what he was doing. If the work became disa
greeable he left it without jeopardizing the welfare of
his family.
Most men, he said, would not be satisfied with only
one job; for one they might be paid, but their natural in
clinations would usually demand that they follow a few or
several different interests. So a man should not have to
spend so much time at a paying job that he was not free to
enjoy the leisure of practicing some avocations, especial
ly if they were creative and artistic. As he suggested in
one of the lectures, Morris believed that man, after the
Renaissance, had lost much of his instinct for beauty in
the mechanical world of science and machinery, and Morris
continued to argue that nineteenth-century man needed
freedom from onerous and debilitating labor in order to
rediscover beauty.
By "a free and unfettered animal life” Morris meant
that men and women should be allowed to love with a
"healthy passion" so long as genuine love existed, and he
58
believed that no institution, church, marriage, or soci
ety, should force them to continue a relationship which
no longer made them happy.
Young children, young people in their legal minority,
and old people who were no longer capable of working
should have no fear for their welfare, for children were
expected to share the work when they were capable of do
ing so, and those who had contributed to the welfare of
their society would be cared for so long as they lived.
The interdependent nature of his ideal society guaranteed
that the basic needs of everyone would be met so long as
food, clothing, and shelter were available. So long as
no one hoarded anything, that is, kept for himself more of
anything than he could actually use, Morris believed that
the earth, properly worked, could provide for all the peo
ple. Thus, no children would starve or be forced to work
long hours in factories, the slaves of profit-taking own
ers or managers or middlemen who controlled the working
conditions. Freedom from the fear of growing old and be
coming a burden on society was an important characteristic
of the society for which Morris hoped.
People would be free to move about over the land, to
take up residence where they liked for any reason and to
work at jobs which produced what their society needed. If
a man had grown weary of being a cook in a large commu
nity, he was to be free to do something sedentary in the
59
country, like lock-keeping on a river, or lie might trade
jobs with a farmer each season.
The freedom to enjoy leisure was one of the most
valuable possessions of all people in Morris’s ideal
state. Leisure was not idleness. Leisure was the time
that a person had, when he was still fresh for activity,
to pursue his artistic bents, practice his avocations, and
in some way contribute to the welfare and the beauty of
his community. If he were exhausted from his labors at
the end of his expected working period, then he could not
be creative; but with each person doing his share of the
work each one was not exhausted. Morris did not specify
how long a working-day or a working-week or a working-life
should be, but he wanted a person to work only as long as
he could be enthusiastic about the work so that he would
do a good job of it. The work should not be so tiring
that the worker had no time to think creatively or at
least think of pleasant things while he was working. Then
when he had labored he might, like the fourteenth-century
artisan, want to spend a few hours a week carving stone
for the, new public building. The creative person was thus
provided with the opportunity to create beauty which could
be enjoyed by everyone. Morris was certain that each per
son had a deep desire for aesthetic pleasure, which he
referred to as an ’ ’instinct for beauty,” but this instinc
tive desire could not be satisfied if the beauty of the
60
earth were destroyed or made unavailable by laws of pri
vate property, or if artistic beauty could not be created.
His ideal society was free to enjoy the instinct for beau
ty in which Morris believed.
To suggest that man should be free from narrow creeds
was to introduce the general problem of freedom from
nearly all the institutions that existed in the nineteenth
eentury. Among the institutions of Morris's day from
which the citizen of his ideal soeiety was free were the
church, centralized government, political parties, and a
class system of any kind. Since Morris believed so
strongly in the individual will operating according to the
golden rule of the Sermon on the Mount, he would eliminate
any institution which wielded power over that individual
will. All institutions were to him artificial systems for
controlling men, and he would have no slavish dependence
on men who were organized in any way to control the
thought or actions of other men, who should be allowed to
live and develop themselves according to natural laws.
Being freed of responsibility to institutions, man
was freed of financial worries, hunger, misery, poverty,
class struggles, domination, and deprivation of any kind
so long as he was willing to share hiB responsibilities
for reasonable work toward the betterment of his commu
nity.
When no one wanted to take advantage of anyone else,
61
man would be free from worries of war, injustice, and the
problems of ownership. The elimination of money, private
property, and vested interests would allow no one to store
anything for himself so that he could control his fellow
men whom he wanted to use to his advantage.
In an equalitarian society Morris believed that no
man should be inhibited from communicating with all other
men. Some of the most serious problems that arose in his
society of the nineteenth century, he thought, stemmed
from the fact that communication among all men was very
difficult if not impossible, so many differences existing
among people of different classes, educational back
grounds, and aims in life that they were never parts of
one society. How far his idea of one great society was
to be carried, he did not say specifically. He hoped that
it might extend throughout all of England, but he appar
ently wanted a free, completely equalitarian society for
all the peoples on earth.
The freedom of which Morris dreamed may be summarized
briefly as follows:
A. Freedom and cultivation of the individual will.
B. Free and unfettered animal life for all men so
long as no one injured or violated the rights of
his fellow men.
C. Freedom from all institutions.
D. Freedom to seek pleasure and happiness.
62
E. Freedom to follow knowledge and the creation of
beauty for their own sakes.
F. Freedom from the domination of one man or a group
of men over any individual.
2. Pleasureful Work in Beautiful Surroundings
Instead of being the curse that labor was for most
people in the nineteenth century, Morris believed that a
person’s work should be something which genuinely inter
ested him, something in which he believed; it should be
the kind of work that one would do even if he were not
rewarded for it. Each person should have the work for
which he had not only an interest but also the natural
aptitudes. A part of any person’s interest in his work
was knowing that what he did was useful to himself and to
someone else, that the work was needed and would benefit
society. Work, in a few words, should be a pleasure; it
should be honorable and necessary, not the curse that de
bilitating labor was for the person who was exhausted at
the end of each laboring period. If a man did not under
stand what he was working for, making a part of a machine
which he was never to see, for instance, the curse was
greater than if he merely worked for enough money to keep
working at a disagreeable task. The cursedness arose,
Morris said, from the injustice of the master-slave system!
in which a worker gave all he had, his labor, to a system
which used that labor to gain profits in which the laborer.
63
did not share. Pleasureful work never involved a labor
hierarchy in which a master, owner, or middleman con
trolled the workers. Each worker was to he independent
and free of any attachment except for his interest in his
work.
To make labor attractive Morris suggested that a
man's work should be considerably varied; a forester, for
instance, might spend time raising crops, as well as prac
ticing one or more of the arts and handcrafts. Since most
of his work would be in or near his home, his dwelling
place should be attractive in itself and should be in a
beautiful garden setting. Cities should have parks and
open places where grass and trees grew, so that those who
worked in the cities would find pleasure in their labors
in the midst of natural beauty rather than among crowded,
dirty, noisy, stinking factories in a "tyranny of bricks
and paving."
What about the "rough" work such as sewer emptying
and garbage disposal? Morris suggested that no one should
have to work at such tasks except in short spells; every
one, however, should take part in it so that no one would
find himself burdened with a lifelong, disagreeable task.
Since labor was organized toward the production of
useful things, much of what was, in the nineteenth cen
tury, useless toil would be eliminated when the desire for
luxuries was replaced by healthy desires for only those
. - — — ---------------
64
things which were needed. Needless work was that work
which produced something that was not actually used to the
benefit of the society? so each person needed to he con
scientiously concerned that his labors were for the bene
fit of his community, for waste was to be avoided. A good
citizen was one who worked for the benefit of society; a
bad citizen was one who did not work for the good of the
community. "Criminally idle" Morris called the person
who did not work at all, but he did not suggest What might
be done to a drone, for he assumed that all would work if
their labors were appreciated by the people who actually
used the products of labor and knew who made them.
3. Participation in Creative Artistry by All
Por Morris art was the expression of the enjoyment of
work. Art should be a part of the lives of all the people
in an ideal society. Art was tied up with politics, mo
rality, and religion; in Morris's terms art was a reli
gion; so the creation of things beautiful and elevating,
the maintaining at a high level the people's artistic
senses, was the highest calling for a people who had re
discovered their natural instinct for beauty. Artistic
creations did not have necessarily to be lofty paintings,
or tapestries, or cathedrals, or symphonies, or anything
that could be produced only by artistic geniuses after
years of education or training by other serious artists
in, say, an architectural college. Artistic training was
65
begun when children saw beautiful, simple objects about
them in their daily lives, in their homes, wherever they
lived, and played, and worked. Seeing pretty household
objects about them, children wanted to sew pretty clothes
and embroider them with lovely embellishments, made simple
but attractive and useful furnishings for their homes and
public buildings. All their lives they would want to dec
orate inside and outside and, if they had talent, they
would be allowed to carve wood and stone to beautify their
homes and public buildings.
Morris found no gentlemanly pleasure in sitting doing
nothing. Virtue existed in working and creating for the
benefit of society, not in trying to keep from working and
being maintained by the labors of others. This "gentle-
manly attitude" Morris called usury. His earthly paradise
demanded that the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve delve
and spin. The gentleman and fine lady did not exist where
everyone worked.
One of the reasons that Morris wanted the children to
be exposed as early as possible to works of art and other
things beautiful was that without personal contact with
art humanity would lose its elevated sense of beauty. He
thought the common people had lost this sense of beauty in
the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Morris did not accept the Renaissance as a step forward in
man’s search for beauty and the ideal life. He believed
66
that man had reached his greatest humanitarian heights in
the fourteenth century in England and that society needed
to eliminate the commercialism that had grown with the
slavery system that developed with the Renaissance. Mor
ris did not want to re-estahlish the feudal system of the
fourteenth century, hut he did hope that man would begin
I
moving toward an ideal society that was based upon the
pre-commercial, pre-machinery society of the fourteenth
century when the common people did their own work, helped
benefit society however they could, and willingly partici
pated in artistic activities such as decorating churches,
keeping their homes simple and beautiful, and maintaining
the garden-like setting of both town and country.
Morris had proved many times in his Merton Abbey dye-
works and among his weavers, tapesters, and glazers in the
firm of Morris & Co. that he could make young, inexperi
enced boys into successful artisans by interesting them in
artistic creativity. Morris believed that everyone or
nearly everyone could be creative but that his society
seldom provided the opportunity or the incentive to
create. Art, for Morris, was the expression of the enjoy
ment of work; it should be for the people and by the peo
ple to enrich their lives. "All must work according to
their ability," Morris said to the Hampstead liberal Club
in 1884, each person working usefully for the support of
each other. In his ideal society each person discovered
67
his abilities early and happily used them all his life,
discovering new bents, interests, and talents as he grew
older. As a man became proficient in an art he taught it
willingly to others, and so all the people assumed their
shares of the labors which would benefit the community.
The commercial society was one which discouraged the arts,
and the dearth of artistry among all the people was the
root of most of the evil in his society, Morris thought.
Art would awaken them again to the fullness of life;
without art a people would perish.
4. Social equality
Morris recognized in any group of people intellectual
and physical difference^, but the individuals in his ideal
society would enjoy social equality. In his commonweal
collective men respected and practiced the principle of
"one for all and all for one.*'
With the elimination of property ownership and,
hence, the elimination of a monetary system, the levels of
rich and poor would dissolve into a unilateral bourgeoi
sie. The only kind of aristocracy that would obtain would
be the artistically talented leaders or "Directors of
art," as Morris called them. The old blooded aristocracy
and the aristocracy of wealth would melt into the common
blood of humanity, and thus his ideal of one class would
be realized.
To his highly class-conscious English public, Morris
68
suggested that his fellow socialists should accept as a
transitional step toward ideal classlessness these three
levels, so long as they all worked together as one:
1. The Directors of Art, the talented "masters" who were
the acknowledged leaders and teachers of others. 2. The
"refined class" of directors of labor, philosophy, and of
the moribund institutions. 3. The workers themselves,
the real sustainers of society and the inheritors of
everything in the land. But, Morris insisted, this "prac
tical" three-level system, which he would accept tempo
rarily, must be prelude to his real hope for a genuinely
classless, completely co-operative, interdependent soci
ety of people.
"Interdependence" was the economic term that Morris
used to express in a word the ideal of "one for all and
all for one." Buying and selling would not involve any
money, only the exchange of the results of labor. Thus a
farmer who needed furnishings for his house might keep an
artisan in food for a year in exchange for the furniture
which the artisan might make in about a year. Morris con
stantly stressed that the preservation of the class system
was the chief cause of war and waste in society, and he
believed that these two evils would disappear when people
lived in a classless society of interdependent people each
of whom needed the other people and worked for the benefit
of all. The competitive, profit-taking, slave-master_____
69
commercial system of Morris's day was the opposite of what
i
he dreamed in an ideal society.
Two sentences sum up much of what Morris hoped for in
this equalitarian characteristic of his society of the
future. In "At a Picture Show, 1884," he said, "The work
man must learn to understand that he must have no master,
no employer save himself— himself collectively, that is to
say, the commonweal . . . ." In "Art under Plutocracy"
(1883) he said that the middle-class ideal of a reformed
society was "all the world turned bourgeois, big and
little, peace under the rule of competitive commerce, ease
of mind and a good conscience to all . . . ."
Two societies were suggested in these quotations, the
first a genuinely ideal society, the second what Morris
called the "practical ideal" for which he could hope in
his own day.
5• Decentralized government
Since Morris believed that the person himself, not
any organization of persons, should be the final consid
eration in matters of governance, he wished to eliminate
any and all forms of government. He argued that if every
person were responsible to every other person in the so
ciety, no government would be needed; each person solved
his own problems or participated, where he was concerned,
in solving with his peers the problems that might arise
in their small soeial group. The neighbors along a street
70
discussed together whether a need existed for repaving
their street; if repaving was deemed necessary they de
cided who among them would take time from their other
work to do the paving.
The only social unit that Morris approved of was a
commune, a group of neighbors working independently at
their pleasureful tasks hut living interdependently, each
person in the commune knowing whom he could depend on to
do certain necessary tasks or provide a commodity needed
by the group or by any individual. A "reasonable society
would be a great federation of communes, federated for
definite purposes of the organization of livelihood and
exchange."
Politics would not exist in Morris’s ideal human
society because politics, he thought, grew out of the de
sires for status, control of property, and the control of
men. Since in his happy state the one class of people
owned all the land in common, and each person desired to
control only himself, the need for politics would never
arise.
Morris rarely used such a word as "nation" or
"state." In his lecture "True and False Society" (1887)
he said that the state was "the nation organized for un
wasteful production and exchange of wealth." But this did
not refer to a nation in the nineteenth or in the twen
tieth-century senses of the word. In his nation the
71
people had no elected representatives or political system
of any kind. Especially disagreeable to Morris was any
system which controlled men, whose wills should be free,
and stole from workers those things which their hands had
produced, their wealth. Eo system of laws was needed or
anyone to administer them; so no legality was necessary
jto confine the ways of responsible men. Nor was nation-
i
ality a necessity or a problem; all the people on earth
should be free to move about as they liked so long as they
practiced the golden rule and did their share of the labor
required for the good of the community, large or small.
6. Universal Education
Children did not begin going to school at a certain
age, because no organized system of education existed in
Morris's ideal human society, but neither did education
cease for anyone, no matter his age. Although schools and
colleges were not a part of Morris's dream, education (or
what we might call vocational training) was available for
all who wished to learn. Children at early ages were
taught by other children to swim, row, sail, and ride
horses, and then their parents or neighbors taught them
"elementary things" such as carpentry, smithying, shear
ing, tending crops, cooking, sewing, reading, and writing.
These latter two skills Morris assumed would become habits
to children very early and would be of value in helping
i
jthem enjoy the leisure time which their physical labors
72
made possible. Two of the fine arts in which all people
should participate were thinking and conversation. Li
braries were to be available in the communities so that
people could read and by increasing their knowledge could
and would improve their conversation and provide them
selves with the wherewithal for thinking while they went
about their daily tasks. Morris said that he composed
poetry while working at his looms and did not think much
of anyone who could not be mentally creative while his
hands were busy.
Just as everyone would be a student in the new order,
so would every one be a teacher too. The skills that any
person had acquired he would teach to anyone else who was
interested enough to want to learn them. Morris believed
that training everyone to participate in handicrafts and
fine arts would elevate the entire community. He wanted
practice in the arts to become something so natural to all
people that they would cease even to know the word "art11;
they would create artistically as naturally as they
breathed or walked.
Morris expressed his educational ideal as having ”the
opportunity to have my share of whatever knowledge there
is in the world according to my capacity or bent of mind.”
He believed that education (and civilization too) was pos
sible only when all those who possibly could participate
were involved in something artistically creative. Morris
insisted that an artistic person would practice no evil on
anyone because art would sublimate the creative person,
reveal everyone’s natural goodness, and subvert the evil
in mankind. "I want everyone," he said, "to have manners
and breeding according to their innate goodness and kind
ness." An artistically oriented society, he believed,
would assume the obligation of instilling in each person
the manners that would develop the virtues of goodness
and kindness.
The one constant warning from Morris was that educa-
tion must not be used for commercial advantage. To go
through a long educational process in order to be given a
higher position than one that could be obtained by someone
who had not had the same advantages was simply to use edu
cation to take advantage of someone else. Society’s job,
he thought, was to help an individual, by way of educa
tion, to find his abilities and then develop them to the
satisfaction (in creativity) of the individual and the
benefit of society (in beauty and necessary objects).
7. Use of the Products of Labor as the Basis for Exchange
Since in Morris’s equalitarian society money was no
longer needed, it did not exist. All property was owned
in common, and no one had more of anything than he could
actually use; the land was worked by individuals according
to their capacities, and all men were above "the condition
I
jof the satisfaction of their material needs," so no one
74
could be materially rich. One man might be especially
rich in talent and so be highly productive, and he then
had the praise of others who enjoyed what he created, and
no medium of exchange which had extrinsic value was neces-
isary. The value of the product of labor was determined on
the basis of the time it took to produce and need for the
product. "In a society of equality the demand for an
article would be a standard for its usefulness . . . ,"
Morris said in his lecture called "Communism" in 1892.
The price of an article would be the cost of production,
and since no man would work to produce something unneeded
he would not waste natural resources or his own labors in
producing waste. Because profit could not exist in the
exchange of equal values, a medium of exchange was unnec
essary, and the profit motive would disappear with the
impossibility of storing riches. The exchange between
producer and consumer would automatically eliminate any
middleman; without money one man could not buy from a pro
ducer and sell for a profit to a consumer. Since the
limit of price would have to be the cost of production,
and sinee all people owned the land, the source of all
wealth, the price might vary slightly according to the de
gree of skill and the amount of time involved in produc
ing the article.
Because few people produced everything which they
needed and the only things that they had to exchange in
75
their interdependent society were the results of labor,
all people had to work. Labor made it possible for each
person to live and for society itself to subsist, but no
man could take advantage of another without a system for
storing riches or passing riches along to others. Ho one
could become wealthy by inheritance. He might inherit
talent, but he had to work that talent to produce some
thing which he could exchange with another man who had
produced something that the talented man needed.
Once money was eliminated Morris believed that all
men would share and profit equally no matter what their
jobs were. The captain of a ship would be a captain be
cause he was capable of discharging the proper responsi
bilities, but he would be fed and lodged equally with the
stokers on the same ship and all the passengers. With the
elimination of money and the love of money, men should
live happily together because they would have to work for
each other to stay alive.
Morris did not mention any kind of burdensome penal
system or any kind of punishment in a society in which he
expected all men to be good, but he did use the phrase
"criminally idle" to refer to anyone who was capable of
working but refused to do his share of work. But the
criminally idle worker would not have to be exiled or in
carcerated, for he would starve and be without shelter,
having no product which he could exchange with others for
76
his livelihood.
8. G-ood Health
The people of Morris's ideal human society would he
healthy once they were freed from poverty, from poor
housing conditions, and from the fear of not satisfying
their basic physical needs. Since no one would be denied
sufficient food for sustaining him, and the earth was
capable of producing more than enough to tsupply everyone's
needs, all the people would be well fed. All were ex
pected to do some outside work which would give them
healthy exercise where they breathed clean air and lived
in the natural garden-like setting where Morris believed
men's animal needs could best be satisfied. The beautiful
clean natural setting would satisfy more than the mere
physical desires of men whose sense of beauty was awak
ened; the setting would fulfill man's psychological desire
for beauty. One would do his work at home or in the open
fields amidst beauty, and this would satisfy the soul,
Morris insisted, for without aesthetic satisfaction no one
could be healthy.
All the characteristics of Morris's ideal society
that have been discussed heretofore should help to make
people healthy, ho one was chained to a mechanical job,
unvarying, year after year, but, rather, each person did
several different tasks whose very variety kept him
healthily enthusiastic about his work, knowing that he
77
could change his job whenever he grew weary of it.
When men had no longer to fear for their own or for
their family's basic needs their health would improve
psychologically; they could rest comfortably and enjoy
amusements and recreative activity that would stimulate
and elevate them.
9. Honesty
An honest society, Morris said, was one which strove
for the happiness of the human race, one which gave each
member a chance for a happy life by allowing each person
to develop his human faculties to the utmost. To Morris,
the commercial, bitterly competitive system of his own day
was very little concerned with the welfare of all the peo
ple. In a commercial system those who could would raise
themselves above the level of the common people and would
profiteer on their labors. For Morris this was dishon
esty. An honest society would allow each person to enjoy
the full fruits of his labors so that he would never need
to fear for his livelihood.
An honest society allowed each person free access to
the raw materials, the land and stock, of the community,
and took care that there was no waste of labor, of nat
ural resources, or of the products of labor. The obliga
tion of each person was to assume his honest share of the
labor necessary to sustain the community and not to waste
anything. When each person realized his dependence on
78
every other member of the community, and each person gen
uinely became his brother's keeper, then that society
would have the integrity and sense of responsibility that
Morris said was characteristic of an honest society.
10. Happiness
All of the previously listed characteristics of
Morris's ideal human society when added together made up
this last characteristic, happiness. To state specifi
cally what it was that made for happiness in an ideal so
ciety, then, would be to recapitulate all of Morris's sug
gestions in his many lectures.
A happy society, like a happy individual, was one
which was free, all the individuals in the society engaged
in pleasureful work in beautiful surroundings and doing
something artistically creative if they had the capacity
for such creation. Everyone enjoyed social equality, and
no one was limited by any institution from pursuing his
healthy desires so long as he injured none of his fellows.
Government was so decentralized as almost not to exist.
The Golden Rule practiced throughout society would prevent
injustice. Educating and training each person so that he
could fully use his capabilities was the responsibility of
everyone in the society. No money existed, so everyone
who could work was obligated to do his share of labor for
the good of the community, the medium of exchange being
the product of each man's labors. With everyone working,
79
a plenitude of good food and shelter was available, so no
one suffered from the lack of basic needs, and no one was
overworked or in misery or worrying about his family, so
all were healthy. Without money, property, or the desire
to rise above their fellow men and take advantage of them,
men were honest. Add together these characteristics in a
group of neighbors living simple lives with no machinery
save that which did the work which no man enjoyed doing,
and one had a happy society.
Morris said that the true secret of happiness lay "in
taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily
life, in elevating them by art.*1 He did not believe that
people could be happy unless they were busy and creating
something in which they were interested and which would
benefit society and until their chief needs were satisfied
but not oversatisfied. Unhappiness was sure to stem from
one man’s having more than he could use of anything; more
than enough food or two beds per person Morris called lux
ury, which was the opposing vice of simplicity and hon
esty. The conscientious practice of these latter two vir
tues precluded a person's being unjust to his fellows.
"The abolishment of slavery,” was the brief summational
statement he made to show the direction of change that he
wanted man to pursue so that all could enjoy a "free and
full life and the consciousness of life." He hoped for a
society in which all men could pleasurably exercise their
80
energies and then enjoy "the rest which the expenditure
of energies made necessary."
CHAPTER II
In 1886 and 1887 Morris published serially A Dream of
John Ball in.the Commonweal (of which he was the editor),
the newly-founded organ of the Socialist League. The
1
title, A Dream of John Ball. is somewhat confusing in
that one might think the dream was John Ball's; actually
the unnamed narrator, a man from Essex, had the dream
about John Ball, a fourteenth-century Kentish priest, who
was one of the instigators of the peasants' revolt in
1381. The narrator, a ballad-singer, fell into a deep
sleep in the nineteenth century and awakened at that mo
ment in history when the villeins of Kent had armed them
selves and were ready to march to London under Wat Tyler
to seek increased freedom from King Richard II, who, they
thought, could relieve some of their feudal burdens. John
Ball, who called himself "the rascal hedge-priest,"
spurred the rough men of Kent to the rebellion, which
would give them the equality that they believed they de
served.
By indirection one discovers many of the character
istics of the happy society for which Morris hoped. When
1 Collected Works. XVI, 213-288.
81
82
the narrator first awakened in the fourteenth century he
saw new Gothic cathedrals in small villages scattered
about the countryside, no large cities existed besides
London. A "garden-like neatness and trimness" everywhere
delighted him, for he remembered his own "bankrupt-looking
surroundings." Flowers, orchards, small farms beautified
the tranquil scene where everything moved at a slow pace,
and, in spite of the impending strife, the country people
were happy, well fed, and healthy.
Several characteristics of the ideal were suggested
as Morris projected the theme of his story in a Robin Hood
ballad sung by one of John Ball's followers in the tavern
to which the narrator was taken by Will Green.
"... hearken a stave of Robin Hood; maybe that
shall hasten the coming of one I wot of." And he fell
to singing in a clear voice, for he was a young man,
and to a sweet and wild melody, one of those ballads
which in an incomplete and degraded form you have read
perhaps. My heart rose high as I heard him, for it
was concerning the struggle against tyranny for the
freedom of life, how that the wildwood and the heath,
despite of wind and weather, were better for a free
man than the court and the eheaping-town; of the
taking from the rich to give to the poor; of the life
of a man doing his own will and not the will of an
other man commanding him for the commandment's sake.
(XVI, 224)
As the peasants began to gather at the steps of the
village cross, the narrator saw a banner carried aloft,
whieh proclaimed the equalitarianism for which they were
struggling:
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
83
John Ball began his sermon on the importance of fel
lowship, which laid stress on Morris’s basic revolutionary
precept, that the struggle for change whether in the four
teenth or the nineteenth century could not be carried on
by an individual but had to be advaneedbby a well-organ-
2
ized group of people.
Ah, my brothers, what an evil doom is this, to be an
outcast from the Church, to have none to love you and
to speak with you, to be without fellowship! For
sooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of
fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and lack of
fellowship is death: and the deeds that ye do upon
the earth, it is for fellowship's sake that ye do
them, and the life that is in it, that shall live on
and on for ever, and each one of you part of it, while
many a man's life upon the earth from the earth shall
wane.
Therefore, I bid you not dwell in hell but in heav
en, or while ye must, upon earth, which is a part of
heaven, and forsooth no foul part.
Forsooth, he that waketh in hell and feeleth his
heart fail him, shall have memory of the merry days
of earth, and how that when his heart failed him
there, he cried on his fellow, were it his wife or
his son or his brother or his gossip or his brother
sworn in arms, and how that his fellow heard him and
came and they mourned together under the sun, till
again they laughed together and were but half sorry
between them. This shall he think on in hell, and
cry on his fellow to help him, and shall find that
therein is no help because there is no fellowship,
but every man for himself. Therefore, I tell you that
the proud, despiteous rich man, though he knoweth it
not, is in hell already, because he hath no fellow;
and he that hath so hardy a heart that in sorrow he
thinketh of fellowship, his sorrow is soon but a
story of sorrow— a little change in the life that
knows not ill." (XYI, 230-231)
2
Elbert Hubbard, William Morris Book (East Aurora,
New York, 1907), p. 42. In a letter to Robert Thompson
dated June 20, 1884, Morris said, ". . . grasp the fact
that the individualist efforts to break the chains of
society must fail."
84
The people had released John Ball from prison three
days before this sermon. He had been placed there by the
Archbishop of Canterbury for fomenting riot and rebellion
among such people as those whoim he was addressing at the
cross and to whom he had to make clear the nature of the
"enemy1 ' against whom the lowly laborers were waging war:
And next, ye know who is the foeman, and that is
the proud man, the oppressor, who scorneth fellowship,
and himself is a world to himself and needeth no help
er nor helpeth any, but, heeding no law, layeth law
on other men because he is rich; and surely every one
that is rich is such an one, nor may be other. (XVI,
254)
Forsooth, too many rich men there are in this
realm; and yet if there were but one, there would be
one too many, for all should be his thralls. Hearken,
then, ye men of Kent. For overlong belike have I
held you with words; but the love of you constrained
me, and the joy that a man hath to babble to his
friends and his fellows whom he hath not seen for a
long season.
Now, hearken, I bid you: To the rich men that eat
up a realm there cometh a time when they whom they
eat up, that is the poor, seem poorer than of wont,
and their complaint goeth up louder to the heavens;
yet it is no riddle to say that oft at such times the
fellowship of the poor is waxing stronger, else would
no man have heard his cry. Also at such times is the
rich man become fearful, and so waxeth in cruelty,
and of that cruelty do people misdeem that it is
power and might waxing. Forsooth, ye are stronger
than your fathers, because ye are more grieved than
they, and ye should have been less grieved than they
had ye been horses and swine; and then, not strong
to bear, but to do. (XVI, 235-236)
Morris believed that men gathered and stored up money
beyond what was needed for normal sustenance for the sole
purpose of putting themselves in positions to control
those who had less money. For example, a rich man would
85
buy a farm or build a factory and hire people to work for
him for less money than their work was actually worth.
The owner did no or very little work and profited from the
labor of his employees, who stayed in his employ beeause
they would starve if they did not. Morris believed that
such a system of ownership control was immoral, that a man
had no right to enslave other men and force them, as it
were, to work for him, the owner, who did not pay his
workmen according to the value in trade of the products of
«
their hands. For Morris, the owner was usually a power-
hungry, selfish man who enjoyed his profits at the expense
of his laboring staff and actually violated, in his eco
nomic practices, most of the ideals for which Morris was
fighting.
In the hope of ridding man of a feudal system that
created social inequalities, John Ball urged his Kentish
neighbors to rebel against the landlord system that sepa
rated men from enjoying fellowship and caused those who
labored- hardest to suffer from want while those who worked
least had more than they could ever use. Morris did not
make John Ball analyze the inequality; he merely preached
against it, because he believed that the maintenance of
social inequality was wrong. As he continued to incite
the gathered folk, John Ball set forth some of the
86
3
characteristics of the society for which the common peo
ple were struggling.
And how shall it he then when these are gone?
What else shall ye lack when ye lack masters? Ye
shall not lack for the fields ye have, nor the houses
ye have huilt, nor the cloth ye have woven; all these
shall he yours, and whatso ye will of all that the
earth beareth; then shall no man mow the deep grass
for another, while his own kine lack cow-meat; and he
that soweth shall reap, and the reaper shall eat in
fellowship the harvest that in fellowship he hath won;
and he that huildeth a house shall dwell in it with
those that he hiddeth of his free will; and the tithe
barn shall garner the wheat for all men to eat of
when the seasons are untoward, and the rain-drift
hideth the sheaves in August; and all shall be with
out money and without price. Faithfully and merrily
then shall all men keep the holidays of the Church
in peace of body and ^oy of heart. And man shall
help man, and the saints in heaven shall be glad, be
cause men no more fear each other; and the churl
shall be ashamed, and shall hide his churlishness
till it be gone, and he be no more a churl; and fel
lowship shall be established in heaven and on the
earth. (XVI, 237)
Fellowship was the ideal for which the men of Kent
were fighting. While the existing social situation was by
no means to his liking, the beauty of the countryside
deeply touched the narrator, who implied that bucolic life
among the above-described conditions was the natural state
in which modern man would have found himself if men had
not in the intervening years destroyed the beauty of the
earth. In contrast to the crowded city conditions of the
narrator’s nineteenth eentury with no open spaces, this
was the brief scene that the narrator saw in his dream as
3
These characteristics are discussed later in this
chapter.
87
he accompanied Will Green toward the first skirmish with
the King’s men:
. . . wide-open nearly treeless space, not of till
age, as at the other side of the place, hut of pas
ture, the common grazing ground of the township. A
little stream wound about through the ground, with
a few willows here and there; there was only a thread
of water in it this hot summer tide, but its course
could easily be traced by the deep blue-green of the
rushes that grew plenteously in the bed. Geese were
lazily wandering about and near this brook, and a
herd of cows, accompanied by the town bull, were
feeding on quietly, their heads all turned one way;
while half a dozen calves marched close together
side by side like a plump of soldiers, their tails
swinging in a kind of measure to keep off the flies,
of which there was great plenty. (XVI, 242)
In this literary projection of Morris's ideal world
he took the opportunity not appropriately offered in his
lectures and described the inside of a house. This was
Will Green’s home, made by his own hands, beautifully fur
nished by a family which loved artistic decoration and
natural beauty.
The room we came into was indeed the house, for
there was nothing but it on the ground floor, but a
stair in the corner went up the chamber or loft
above. It was much like the room at the Rose, but
bigger; the cupboard was better wrought, and with
more vessels on it, and handsomer. Also the walls,
instead of being panelled, were hung with coarse
loosely-woven stuff of green worsted with birds and
trees woven into it. There were flowers in plenty
stuck about the room, mostly of the yellow blossom
ing flag or flower-de-luce, of which I had seen
plenty in all the ditches, but in the window near
the door was a pot full of those same white poppies
I had seen when I first woke up; and the table was
all set forth with meat and drink, a big salt-cellar
of pewter in the middle, covered with a white cloth.
(XVI, 258)
On the night before the great struggle with the Kin^s
88
forces John Ball drew the narrator to the church where
they could talk; he felt that this stranger had prophetic
powers about the future, that he knew what would happen
when John Ball and the others had given their lives for
this struggle. The priest knew that a better way of life
for his people could come about only after great struggles
and sacrifices. He did not expect to live through the
coming battle, but he believed that achieving a better way
of life for the common people was worth any price. Ball
reflected the opinion that Morris frequently set forth in
his lectures: the revolutionary social changes for which
they hoped could not come immediately. Both believed that
they would come, but those who struggled needed a vision
of the society of the future before they could be persua
ded to sacrifice even their lives for a better society
than the one they knew. Ball had convinced his parish
ioners that all must fight for their ideal of Fellowship,
a society of men genuinely concerned with the welfare of
each person. The priest and Morris shared the desire to
struggle to make the ideal society possible. Ball lis
tened as the narrator spoke for both:
. . . though I die and end, yet mankind yet liveth,
therefore I end not, since I am a man; and even so
thou deemest, good friend; or at the least even so
thou doest, since now thou art ready to die in grief
and torment rather than be unfaithful to the Fellow
ship, yea rather than fail to work thine utmost for
it; whereas, as thou thyself saidst at the cross, with
a few words spoken and a little huddling-up of the
truth, with a few pennies paid, and a few masses sung,__
89
thou mightest have had a good place on the earth and
in that heaven. And as thou doest, so now doth many
a poor man unnamed and unknown, and shall do while
the world lasteth: and they that do less than this,
fail because of fear, and are ashamed of their cow
ardice, and make many tales to themselves to deceive
themselves, lest they should grow too much ashamed
to live. And trust me if this were not so, the world
would not live, but would die. (XVI, 265-266)
As they talked long into the evening John Ball and
the narrator agreed that obligating oneself to a cause and
doing great deeds in the struggle were the highest ends of
life. Beeause the narrator had lived in the future five
hundred years beyond the priest’s life and was aware of
the historical development of man’s societies in western
history, he prophesied for the priest whose life was to be
cut short the next day; he predicted that the cause for
which the villeins fought would eventually be victorious
after long and disappointing defeats. The ’ ’Gilds of
Crafts shall wax and become mightier,” he said; foreign
trade would increase and then, ’ ’There shall be plenty in
the land and not famine.”
"Yea,” said he, ’ ’then shall those that labour be
come strong and stronger, and so soon shall it come
about that all men shall work and none make to work,
and so shall none be robbed, and at last shall all
men labour and live and be happy, and have the goods
of the earth without money and without price.” (XVI,
270)
The priest’s curiosity as to how man would achieve
the dreamed-of status of being ’ ’free and equal” demanded
that the narrator speak at some length about the system
that developed after the peasants’ revolt. Much of what
90 1
|
he said was puzzling to the priest, who had not yet dreamed!
of the usurious system that was to follow the fall of vil
leinage, which they were witnessing in the days before the
Renaissance.
"look you, friend; aforetime the lords, for the most
part, held the land and all that was on it, and the
men that were on it worked for them as their horses
worked, and after they were fed and housed all was
the lords'; but in the time to come the lords shall
see their men thriving on the land and shall say once
more, 'These men have more than they need, why have
we not the surplus since we are their lords?' More
over, in those days shall betide much chaffering for
wares between man and man, and country and country;
and the lords shall note that if there were less corn
and less men on their lands there would be more sheep,
that is to say more wool for chaffer, and that there
of they should have abundantly more than aforetime;
since all the land they own, and and it pays them
quit-rent or service, save here and there a croft or
a close of a yeoman; and all this might grow wool for
them to sell to the Easterlings. Then shall England
see a new thing, for whereas hitherto men have lived
on the land and by it, the land shall no longer need
them, but many sheep and a few shepherds shall make
wool grow to be sold for money to the Easterlings,
and that money shall the lords pouch: for, look you,
they shall set the lawyers a-work and the strong hand
i moreover, and the land they shall take to themselves
and their sheep; and except for these lords of land
few shall be the free men that shall hold a rood of
land whom the word of their lord may not turn adrift
straightway."
"How mean you?" said John Ball: "shall all men be
villeins again?"
"May," said I, "there shall be no villeins in
England."
"Surely then," said he, "it shall be worse, and
all men save a few shall be thralls to be bought and
sold at the cross."
"Good friend," said I, "it shall not be so; all
men shall be free even as ye would have it; yet, as
I say, few indeed shall have so much land as they can
stand upon save by buying such a grace of their
masters."
"And now," said he, "I wot not what thou sayest.
I know a thrall, and he is his master's every hour,
91
and never his own; and a villein I know, and whiles
he is his own and whiles his lord’s; and I know a
free man, and he is his own always; hut how shall he
he his own if he have nought whereby to make his
livelihood? Or shall he he a thief and take from
others? Then he is an outlaw. Wonderful is this thou
t'ellest of a free man with nought wherehy to live!"
"Yet so it shall he," said I, "and hy such free
men shall all wares he made."
"Nay, that cannot he; thou art talking riddles,"
said he; "for how shall a wood-wright make a chest
without the wood and the tools?"
Said I, "He must needs huy leave to labour of them
that own all things except himself and such as him
self."
"Yea, hut wherewith shall he huy it?" said John
Ball. "What hath he except himself?"
"With himself then shall he huy it," quoth I, "with
his hody and the. power of labour that lieth therein;
with the price of his labour shall he huy leave to
labour."
"Riddles again!" said he; "how can he sell his la
bour for aught else hut his daily bread? He must win
hy his labour meat and drink and clothing and housing!
Can he sell his labour twice over?"
"Not so," said I, "hut this shall he do belike; he
shall sell himself, that is the labour that is in him,
to the master that suffers him to work, and that mas
ter shall give to him from out the wares he maketh
enough to keep him alive, and to beget children and
nourish them till they he old enough to he sold like
himself, and the residue shall the rich man keep to
himself."
John Ball laughed aloud, and said: "Well, I per
ceive we are not yet out of the land of riddles. The
man may well do what thou sayest and live, hut he may
not do it and live a free man." (XYI, 271-273)
Their conversation continued until dawn when John
Ball, with the narrator’s help, saw the fruits of his
struggle in the society of the future:
. . I say if the men still he men, what will happen
except that there should he all plenty in the land,
and not one poor man therein, unless of his own free
will he choose to lack and he poor, as a man in re
ligion or such like; for there would then be such
abundance of all good things, that, as greedy as the
lords might he, there would he enough to satisfy
92
their greed, and yet leave good living for all who
laboured with their hands; so that these should la
bour far less than now, and they would have time to
learn knowledge, so that there should be no learned
or unlearned, for all should be learned; and they
would have time also to learn how to order the mat
ters of the parish and the hundred, and of the par
liament of the realm, so that the king should take
no more than his own; and to order the rule of the
realm, so that all men, rich and unrich, should have
part therein; and so by undoing of evil laws and
making of good ones, that fashion would come to an'
end whereof thou speakest, that rich men make laws
for their own behoof; for they should no longer be
able to do thus when all had part in making the laws;
whereby it would soon come about that there would be
no men rich and tyrannous, but all should have enough
and to spare of the increase of the earth and the
work of their own hands. Yea surely, brother, if
ever it cometh about that men shall be able to make
things, and not men, work for their superfluities,
and that the length of travel from one place to an
other be made of no account, and all the world be a
market for all the world, then all shall live in
health and wealth; and envy and grudging shall per
ish. For then shall we have conquered the earth and
it shall be enough; and then shall the kingdom of
heaven be come down to the earth in very deed. (XVI,
281-282)
In A Dream of John Ball Morris was concerned with
seven of the ten characteristics of the ideal society that
he had developed in his lectures. In John Ball he omitted
any mention of Number 3> the participation in creative
artistry; he was not concerned about Number 5, the decen
tralization of government or of any government at all; and
Number 9, honesty, he perhaps would not have denied as a
characteristic of the fourteenth-century Kentishmen, but
he did not imply that it was important to the revolution
aries who tried to overthrow the king’s tyranny.
One characteristic that had not been developed in the
93
lectures was of great importance here, fellowship. An
other characteristic that we infer from his admiration of
the bucolic setting here and on which he also placed
stress in News from Nowhere, was rural existence. These
two characteristics will be discussed at the end of this
recapitulation.
The nine characteristics of William Morris's ideal
human society derived from A Dream of John Ball are the
following. (The numbering of the characteristics here is
followed from pages 56-80 in the recapitulation of the
lectures.)
1. Freedom
Freedom in A Dream of John Ball meant essentially the
same thing that it did in the lectures. This has been
discussed above in the recapitulation to Chapter I. The
struggle in John Ball, like that in the lectures, was
against tyranny and for the purpose of giving the common
working people freedom to work at tasks which they enjoyed
as responsible members of a society which would have the
characteristics outlined on the previous pages. But
Morris's laborers would not brook a master-slave system;
each person expected to bear his share of the labor that
was necessary for the mutual success and well-being of all
i
L
94-
members of the society.^" The happy workman was the man
doing his own will, not commanded to work for another.
Morris "believed that if men were given the opportunity to
practice the G-olden Rule they would, and then all men
would he free, hut the peasants in the fourteenth century
knew that men would not have an opportunity for equality
until all were free; hence the struggle for freedom even
if it were to cost the lives of many peasants. The peas
ants knew that the struggle for freedom was a never-ending
and costly hattle, for tyranny would grow the moment man
stopped struggling for the freedom to do his own will, to
work for the happiness of all his fellows.
2- Opportunity for Work,
Many times in A Dream of John Ball Morris described
the fresh heauty of the countryside, of the people them
selves, and of their homes, where they worked. An impor
tant part of every person's freedom accrued as a result of
each person's working as much as he and his fellows be
lieved he should work. The men usually worked at agricul
tural tasks, and women worked in the home, providing food
and clothing for the families. If they produced more than
^Morris's son-in-law, H. H. Sparling, told of one oc
casion when Morris showed Sparling a copy of Love is
Enough and said, "There's a lie for you, though 'twas I
that told it! Love isn't enough in itself; love and work,
yes* Work and love, that's the life of a man! Why, a
fellow can't even love decently unless he's got work to
do, and pulls his weight in the boat!" (The Kelmscott
Press [London, 1924J, p. 100.)_______________________________
95
they actually needed they traded these products of their
hands for another neighbor's products, or they placed sur
plus crops in a community granary. Thus with everyone
working no great burden of labor fell on any one person or
group of people, and no one was idle. Being free to
choose his own work and enjoying it, each person also had
some leisure time when he could think and drink in the
beauty of the countryside with its many flowers, clear
streams, and great open fields.
Pleasureful work, more than anything else, was the
work that a person did when he knew what he was working
for, when he benefited directly from his work, and when
he felt that he was performing a fair share of the work.
For instance, a man would breed and care for his cattle at
no little labor to himself, but for his pains he and his
family had milk, meat, and hides, and perhaps he had
enough surplus that he could trade his milk products for
another man's surplus bacon.
This work attitude was translated into terms of mili
tary obligation for the Kentish villeins when all realized
from John Ball's sermon that they now had to seize the op
portunity to put down tyranny so that they could continue
their pleasureful labors. The peasants took pleasure in
the fight!
4. Social Equality
Early in the narrative one of John Ball's followers
96
sang a Robin Hood ballad about the heroic deeds in Sher
wood forest, the common people taking from the rich and
giving to the poor. Robin Hood’s enforced program of
sharing the wealth was symbolic of the peasants’ struggle.
Men had become powerful in the sense that they could de
mand labor from the common people of the fourteenth cen
tury, and as controllers of men they amassed fortunes in
land and money which set them above the workers, put them
in a separate social class. The peasants' revolt was an
i
attempt to destroy this hierarchy. Ownership of the land
by the people who worked it and the elimination of money
were the two specific objects that the villeins sought.
They believed that the land belonged to everyone and that
no one should use the land to make another person sub
servient to him.
Basically, then, the struggle was to eliminate the
master-slave system of the rich, who heeded no laws, keep
ing the poor in thrall and viciously controlling them by
keeping them poor and hungry and profiting on their la
bors. The peasants fought for an equalitarian society in
which all men worked and shared equally the products of
their labors. Surpluses eould not go to a lord if all men
were equal, but the wealth would be shared, no man build
ing up stores of food or land or money with which he could
make demands of others. Land and labor were to keep men
alive, not to enslave them. Labor was not a commodity
97
that a poor man should offer for a price (usually to the
laborer's disadvantage) to the rich man. With all the la
bor and the products of labor shared equally no man would
control another; social equality would be achieved.
6. Opportunity for Universal Education
The matter of education was mentioned in only one
place in A Dream of John Ball, but it was of no less im
portance there than it was in the lectures. One of the
reasons that the peasants struggled was to win more lei
sure time than they had in their system in which a master
exacted as much work as possible from each "slave." With
equalitarian sharing of the labor the peasants would "have
time to learn knowledge." With time and opportunity for
learning it would be only criminal idleness that kept a
person unlearned. Ideally "there should be no learned or
unlearned, for all should be learned."
The uses of knowledge were important in this society.
Morris suggested that men should use their educations to
order properly the affairs of the parish, the hundred, and
the parliament so that no man, including the king, could
take more than he deserved. Educated, each man would see
that no laws were passed which would put one man over an-
I
other or allow any one to become rich and tyrannous, and
the increase of the earth would be properly shared by all.
The end of education was freedom and opportunity for all.
98
7* Use of the Products of Labor as the Basis for Exchange
One of the "basic principles which John Ball preached
to his parishioners was that the things which the people
had worked for were theirs. They built their own houses,
grew their food, made their clothes, and, because they
did, these products of their labors were theirs; no man
should be able to take these products away from them. But
|men did demand that the peasants work for them and did
i
take away much that the workers actually needed to survive
and sold their products and stored riches for themselves.
They could do these things to the workers because the pro
ducts of men's labors were developed from the land, and
the masters owned the land. To free themselves from this
master-slave oppression the working men had to struggle to
free themselves from the master's control: they believed
that the land which they worked should be theirs and was
more rightfully theirs than it was their master's because
they actually lived from the land. The land, then, should
produce the livelihood for each individual and that which
it produced was to be the basis for exchange among all
men. A system of bartering one product for another would
eliminate a false medium of exchange. Without money a man
could not store riches with which he could control his
fellowmen. Thus the tyranny of the wealthy man would be
destroyed, and all would bear their shares of the labor
necessary to keep the members of a community alive. With
99
everyone working the vice of indolence would be gone, all
men would enjoy the pleasure of working together, and they
would be healthy and happy doing so.
8. Good Health
This characteristic of the ideal human society has
been discussed in connection with the lectures and was
mentioned as one of the resultants of using the products
of men's labor as a basis for exchange of goods. little
more needs be said except that under a system in which all
men labored to produce the food and raiment and housing
that were needed there would be enough for all. Men would
be healthy for doing physical work, and they would produce
enough that no one would ever want. Their wealth would be
stored in the form of available foodstuffs in the tithe
barns.
Under this system the people would be mentally
healthy also, not suffering the anxiety of insecurity, and
because money did not exist they had no worry about in
vestments. Their lives and their labors were investments
in their own and in their fellows' welfare.
10. Happiness
This characteristic was discussed last among those
derived from the lectures and perhaps should be placed
last here too, since Morris considered it the result of
having the other characteristics of the ideal human soci
ety, but the numerical order will be maintained so that
10G
the two characteristics derived from John Ball can follow
in their normal order.
Morris believed that men would he happy, that they
would know peace and joy, only when no man feared any
other man and when his basic needs were satisfied. When
all men worked together and equally, no man any other
man’s master, all would be free except in an important
ideal sense: the society was interdependent, and each
person needed every other person to have an efficient and
balanced community. Each person was happy when he saw and
1
discharged his own responsibility to his society and when
he enjoyed the products of the labors of other men, who,
likewise, depended on every other individual. Each person
who labored enjoyed the dignity of maintaining not only
himself but, very importantly, the community. Morris once
said (see footnote, p. 94) that above all things men
needed love and work but that they could not even love de
cently if they did not share in the labor of the commu
nity; love could not persist in a healthy state unless men
worked.
11. Fellowship
Fellowship was one of the two characteristics of the
ideal human society that Morris built in to A' Dream of
John Ball but which were not given emphasis in the lec
tures; rural existence, the other added characteristic,
will be discussed next.
101
"Fellowship" was the one word used to describe the
interdependence of all the people in a community. Each
person worked not for himself hut for a much greater
cause, for the welfare of each other. In his sermon at
the village cross on the day before the battle with the
king’s men John Ball made this characteristic the most im
portant in the lives of his fellow men: ". . . fellowship
is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is
life, and lack of fellowship is death. . .1 1 (XVI, 230).
Since fellowship was the theme of the priest’s sermon,
much of what has already been quoted (Chapter II, p. 83
above) makes very clear the importance of fellowship to
the followers of John Ball. It was the assurance every
man had that no matter whether he was in heaven, in hell,
or on earth, every man with whom he worked was his brother
and would go with him and aid him, nothing withstanding.
Fellowship was having that comfort that Everyman sought
and never found.
12. Rural Existence
In his lectures Morris spoke nearly always to labor
ing groups or to groups of artists in large cities; so he
had little opportunity to urge his listeners to the rich
beauty of the countryside, which was so important to him.
He railed frequently against the "tyranny of brick and
mortar" in the large cities, but not until he wrote this
work did he take up the matter at length in prose.
102
Whenever Morris found man in a happy state of exist
ence that man lived midst the flowing natural beauties of
an unspoiled countryside. The earthly paradise was never
to be discovered in the city; the revolution in Hews from
Nowhere changed the once-crowded cities into civilized
communities, that is, into collections of pretty and small
houses in large, park-like areas, the few streets lined
'with beautiful trees. All of Morris's prose romances were
set in rural areas because the people were agrarian,
living on the land both literally and figuratively.
Morris's rural settings were not essentially differ
ent from the "green world" of such plays as Midsummer
Night * s Dream and As You hike It, in which men and women
left the hurried world of city and court for the refresh
ing wildwood where they were close to the unspoiled crea
tures of nature and away from the wiles and stratagems of
designing men.
A bream of John Ball was set entirely in the woods
and fields of Kent before any cities had been organized
in the shire and when all of the people except the lords
lived by laboring in the fields.
CHAPTER III
Midway "between the writing of A Dream of John Ball
(1886) and Hews from Nowhere (1890) Morris found time in
his socialistic activities and the "busy operations of
Morris & Co. to write The House of the Volfings (1888).
This was the fairyland Mtale of imaginary tribal life on
the verge of Roman conquest” (XIV, xxv) set, as May Morris
suggested, about the foot of the Italian Alps. Richly
aware of the historical past, that was made so real in
A Dream of John Ball, Morris in this tale looked back even
further, into a fourth-century Europe, when the tribes-
people, perhaps the Goths, were having to defend their
simple ways of life from the attacks of Roman legions that
would conq,uer the northern tribesmen and replace their
forest dwellings with Roman cities.
The Prologue that he wrote for the title page of The
House of the Wolfings suggested a weariness with his
urbanized world, that found some relief in contemplation
of the life that European peoples might once have led:
Whiles in the early winter eve
We pass amid the gathering night
• Some homestead that we had to leave
Years past; and see its candles bright
1 Collected Works. XIV, 1-208.
103
104
Shine in the room "beside the door
Where we were merry years agone
But now must never enter more,
As still the dark road drives us on.
E ’en so the world of men may turn
At eve of some hurried day
And see the ancient glimmer "burn
Across the waste that hath no way;
Then with that faint light in its eyes
A while I hid it linger near
And nurse in wavering memories
The hitter-sweet of days that were. (XIV, 1)
The Wolfings were one of many trihes which lived
along the hanks of a stream called Mirkwood-waters. The
people of this simple agricultural community dwelt peace
fully in a large wooden building, which was called the
House of the Wolfings, or, simply, the Roof.
The house, that is to say the Roof, of the Wolfings
of the Midmark stood on the topmost of the slope afore
said, with its hack to the wildwood and its face to
the acres and the water. But you must know that in
those days the men of one branch of kindred dwelt
under one roof together, and had therein their place
and dignity; nor were there many degrees amongst
them as hath befallen afterwards, hut all they of
one blood were brethren and of equal dignity. How-
beit they had servants or thralls, men taken in bat
tle, men of alien blood, though true it is that from
time to time were some of such men taken into the
House, and.hailed as brethren of the blood. (XIV, 5)
Two important characteristics of this society were
thus mentioned early in the story: communal living and
social equality; these characteristics appeared many times
in the tale.
One would not expect a large tribe of people (the ex
tent of their numbers was never mentioned) living under
one roof to lead very complicated or sophisticated lives
105
in the modern sense; indeed simplicity was necessarily an
important characteristic of their society. Because this
great, long wooden dwelling was so important in the lives
of the Wolfings and so much a part of the character of
their existence Morris described it carefully.
As to the house within, two rows of pillars went
down it endlong, fashioned of the mightiest of trees
that might be found, and each one fairly wrought with
base and chapiter, and the wreaths and knots, and
fighting men and dragons; so that it was like a church
of later days that has a nave and aisles; windows
there were above the aisles, and a passage underneath
the said windows in their roofs. In the aisles were
the sleeping-plaees of the Folk, and down the nave
under the crown of the roof were three hearths for
the fires, and above each hearth a luffer or smoke-
bearer to draw the smoke up when the fires were
lighted. Forsooth on a bright winter afternoon it
was strange to see the three columns of smoke going
wavering up to the dimness of the mighty roof, and
one may be smitten athwart by the sunbeams. As for
the timber of the roof itself and its framing, so ex
ceedingly great and high it was, that the tale tells
how that none might see the fashion of it from the
hall-floor unless he were to raise aloft a blazing
faggot on a long pole: since no lack of timber was
there among the men of the Mark.
At the end of the hall anigh the Man's-door was
the dais, and a table thereon set thwartwise of the
hall; and in front of the dais was the noblest and
greatest of the hearths; (but of the others one was
in the very midmost, and another in the Woman's
Chamber) and round about the dais, along the gabled-
wall, and hung from pillar to pillar were woven
cloths pictured with images of ancient tales and the
deeds of the Wolfings, and the deeds of the gods
from whence they came. And this was the fairest
place of all the house and the best-beloved of the
folk, and especially of the older and the mightier
men: and there were tales told and songs sung. . . .
(XIY, 6-71
The Roof itself was the result of the Wolfings1 par
ticipation in creative artistry, an important character
106
istic of every society which Morris admiringly described.
There, midst the beauty that the people of the hall
created, they were happiest.
The Wolfings had not only designed their own great
hall but had built it themselves from the great trees in
the nearby woods. Their leisure hours were spent in carv
ing the wooden pillars and in weaving images into the
cloth hangings that divided the Roof into various living
quarters for the tribe. Under the Roof they carved their
weapons and tools, and they sang songs and told tales
about the Wolfings1 greatness in battle.
Morris described the happiness of communal living
among the Wolfings by picturing a home scene:
. . . the tuns of mead were broached, and the horns
filled and borne round by young maidens, and men ate
and drank and were merry; and from time to time as
some one of the warriors had done with giving heed
to his weapons, he entered into the hall and fell
into the company of those whom he loved most and by
whom he was most beloved; and whiles they talked,
and whiles they sang to the harp up and down that
long house; and the moon risen high shone in at the
windows, and there was much laughter and merriment,
and talk of deeds and arms of the old days . . .
till little by little weariness fell on them, and
they went their ways to slumber, and the hall was
fallen silent. (XIY, 14)
The happiness of the Wolfings stemmed from the simple
pastoral life, communal living in the great hall, enjoying
fellowship, carving and weaving creatively together, no
man ranking above another. This life they wished to con
tinue, and when it was threatened by the Romans they
readily prepared to defend the House of the Wolfings from
the urbanized, wealth-seeking enemy approaching from the
south. The Wood-Sun, a female oraele of the woods, knew
about the enemy and warned Thiodulf, military leader of
the Wolfings, that the conquerors would destroy the an
cient ways of the Wolfings, that the simple tribal dwell
ing would be replaced by highly organized cities. This
was Wood-Sun?s description of the Roman enemy that was
approaching to conquer them:
"For these are the folk of the cities, and in won
drous wise they dwell
Mid confusion of heaped house, dim and black as the
face of hell;
Though therefrom rise roofs most goodly, where their
captains and their kings
Dwell amidst the walls of marble in abundance of
fair things;
And 'mid these, nor worser nor better, but builded
otherwise
Stand the Houses of the Fathers, and the hidden
mysteries.
And as close as are the tree-trunks that within the
beech-wood thrive
E'n so many are their pillars; and therein like men
alive
Stand the images of godfolk in such raiment as they
wore
In the years before the cities and the hidden days
of yore.
Ah for the gold that I gazed on! and their store
of battle gear,
And strange engines that I knew not of, or the end
for whieh they were.
Ah for the ordered wisdom of the war-array of these,
And the folks that are sitting about them in dumb
down-trodden peace!"(XIV, 21)
Wood-Sun’s description of Roman life suggested the
opposite of the ideal for which the Wolfings lived, and
another neighboring tribesman a little later in the tale
108
added another description of Roman life.
"As to their many cities and the wealth of them, that
is sooth; hut as to each city heing the habitation of
each kindred, it is otherwise: for rather it may be
said of them that they have forgotten kindred, and
have none, nor do they heed whom they wed, and great
is the confusion amongst them. And mighty men among
them ordain where they shall dwell, and what shall be
their meat, and how long they shall labour after they
are weary, and in all wise what manner of life shall
be amongst them; and though they be called free men
! who suffer this, yet may no house or kindred gainsay
| this rule and order. In sooth they are a people
mighty, but unhappy." (XIV, 45)
By indirection one discovers in these descriptions
some of the ideal characteristics of the tribal society,
which emerged as the opposite in most cases of what was
found in Roman towns. The Wolfings, in contrast to life
in crowded, ugly cities with many-storied houses, lived
at the edge of the forest, along the banks of a pure
stream, in a beautiful hall. Each person in the tribe
had the freedom to work at what he liked without any di
rection from a master of any kind. He labored for a few
hours a day or until he was tired and then took his ease
among his friends and kindred in the Hall. He did not
store up any kind of wealth; so he had nothing to protect
except his and the tribe’s way of life. The Wolfings
were a happy people.
In A Dream of John Ball Morris dreamed that he was
in the Kentish countryside in the year 1381. In News from
109
1
Howhere he dreamed that he was experiencing five days
among the people of the Thames valley at the end of the
twenty-first century, about 140 years after the great
social revolution of 1952, which resulted in the happy
equalitarian state of ideal communism that he described in
this work.
i So vast was the change in the structure of society
after the revolution that nature itself was different from
anything known in the nineteenth century. England after
the change was a vast garden whose big cities and indus
trial plants had completely disappeared. All the factor
ies along the Thames in and near London were gone, and in
their places were neat cottages set in gardens, flowering
lanes, rich farms, and thick woods. Up the Thames from
the site of his old London home at Hammersmith, the iron
bridge and the soap-works were gone.
Both shores had a line of very pretty houses, low
and not large, standing back a little way from the
river; they were mostly built of red brick and roofed
with tiles, and looked, above all, comfortable, and
as if they were, so to say, alive, and sympathetic
with the life of the dwellers in them. There was a
continuous garden in front of them, going down to
the water’s edge, in which the flowers were now bloom
ing luxuriantly, and sending delicious waves of sum
mer scent over the eddying stream. Behind the houses
I could see great trees rising, mostly planes, and
looking down the water there were the reaches toward
Putney almost as if they were a lake with a forest
shore, -so thick were the big trees. . . . (XVI, 9)
1 Collected Works. XVI, 1-211.
110
The nineteenth-century "tyranny of bricks and mortar"
that was London had given way, in what was Trafalgar
Square-, to "elegantly built much ornamented houses."
Each house stood in a garden carefully cultivated,
and running over with flowers. The blackbirds were
singing their best amidst the garden-trees, which,
except for a bay here and there, and occasional groups
of limes, seemed to be all fruit trees: there were a
great many cherry-trees, now all laden with fruit; and
several times as we passed by a garden we were offered
baskets of fine fruit by children and young girls.
Amidst all these gardens and houses it was of course
impossible to trace the sites of the old streets: but
it seemed to me that the main roadways were the same
as of old.
We came presently into a large open space, sloping
somewhat toward the south, the sunny site of which
had been taken advantage of for planting an orchard,
mainly, as I could see, of apricot trees, in the midst
of which was a pretty gay little structure of wood,
painted and gilded, that looked like a refreshment-
stall. From the southern side of the said orchard ran
a long road, chequered over with the shadow of tall
old pear-trees, at the end of which showed the high
tower of the Parliament House, or Dung Market. (XVI,
42)
Morris called himself "William Guest" to the people
of the future. When William Guest closed his eyes he saw
this same place in London as it was in the nineteenth cen
tury and realized that in his own time man had subjugated
nature and had eliminated it from his life as much as pos
sible; whereas in the ideal world the people had taken
their places in the scheme of nature and so lived in a
world of beauty. Where Manchester had been were now scat
tered stone cottages covered with flowers, the need for
industrial products completely gone in this happy agrarian
state. London had the largest concentration of people,
111
but was now a quiet place of a few thousand people, as it
had been in the fourteenth century, its winding streets
all lined with trees, the Thames a clear stream again,
filled with salmon, whose banks were wild, with flowers
growing to the edge of the water before the tidy houses of
the people, whose lives had meaning because each person
was feeling the joy of creativity in artistic handcrafts.
As the happy party of four people moved up the Thames
toward Oxford they went through newly constructed clean
locks, and found most of the banks lined with willows
growing free and beautiful in contrast to the banks of
Morris's own day when the river trees were polled and up
rooted for firewood and from which the birds had flown.
In the twenty-first century, however, nature had come into
her own again:
I may mention as a detail worth noticing that not
only did there seem to be a great many more birds
about of the non-predatory kinds, but their enemies
the birds of prey were also commoner., A kite passedu
over our heads as we passed Medmenham yesterday; mag
pies were quite common in the hedgerows; I saw sev
eral sparrow-hawks, and I think a merlin; and now
just as we were passing the pretty bridge which had
taken the place of Basildon railway-bridge, a couple
of ravens croaked above our boat, as they sailed off
to the higher ground of the downs. I concluded from
all this that the days of the gamekeeper were over
.... (XVI, 171)
The people of the new world tried to explain to G-uest
that his own society had been dominated by machines and
machine products, a part of the slavery to which they had
given themselves when beauty, art, and nature were
112
forgotten.
1 1 Anyhow they soon began to find out their mistake,
and that only slaves and slaveholders could live
solely by setting machines going."
Glara broke in here, flushing a little as she
spoke: "Was not their mistake once more bred of the
life of slavery that they had been living?— a life
which was always looking upon everything, except man
kind, animate and inanimate— 'nature,' as people used
to call it— as one thing, and mankind as another. It
was natural to people thinking in this way that they
should try to make nature their slave, since they
thought ’nature' was something outside them." (XVI,179)
The ideal world was a time of unmarred summer where
thfe Eves did spin and the Adams did delve, everyone in
love with his beautiful garden and ecstatic over the ex
perience of life in it.
The happy people of Morris's ideal state had many
jcharacteristics which made them different from his nine-
jteenth-century contemporaries. Their exuberant good
health made them seem to William Guest much younger than
they actually were; one girl whom he guessed to be twenty
was forty-two, and she was surprised to hear that Guest
was fifty-six (Morris's actual age when he wrote the
story), for he looked much older to her. They were ex
tremely kind and friendly to everyone and completely al
truistic, no one having anything that he would keep from
anyone else, since no one owned any property. Guest saw
no sick people and never heard about any during his five
days with them. When he remarked that he had seen no poor
people they did not understand him, for "poor" meant to be
11 3
in ill health; "poor” and "rich" in the economic senses
were unknown to them.
Almost everybody was gaily dressed, but especially
the women, who were so well-looking, or even so hand
some, that I could scarcely refrain my tongue from
calling my companion’s attention to the fact. Some
faces I saw that were thoughtful, and in these I no
ticed great nobility of expression, but none that
had a glimmer of unhappiness, and the greater part
(we came upon a good many people) were frankly and
openly joyous. (XVI, 23)
The once-crowded section of London known to Morris's
contemporaries as Kensington Gardens was in the story a
recreation area for children.
Romantic as this Kensington wood was, however, it
was not lonely. We came on many groups both coming
and going, or wandering in the edges of the wood.
Amongst these were many children from six . or eight
years old up to sixteen or seventeen. They seemed
to me to be especially fine specimens of their race,
and were clearly enjoying themselves to the utmost;
some of them were hanging about little tents pitched
on the greensward, and by some of these fires were
burning, with pots hanging over them gipsy fashion.
Dick explained to me that there were scattered houses
in the forest, and indeed we caught a glimpse of one
or two. He said they were mostly quite small, such
as used to be called cottages when there were slaves
in the land, but they were pleasant enough and fit
ting for the wood.
“They must be pretty well stocked with children,"
said I, pointing to the many youngsters about the
way.
"0," said he, "these children do not all come from
the near houses, the woodland houses, but from the
countryside generally. They often make up parties,
and come to play in the woods for weeks together in
summer-time, living in tents, as you see. We rather
encourage them to it; they learn to do things for
themselves, and get to notice the wild creatures; and,
you see, the less they stew inside houses the better
for them. Indeed, I must tell you that many grown
people will go to live in the forests through the
summer, though they for the most part go to the big
ger ones, like Windsor, or the Horest of Dean, or
114
the northern wastes. Apart from the pleasures of it,
it gives them a little rough work, which I am sorry
to say is getting somewhat scarce for these last
fifty years. (XVI, 27-28)
One of the things most difficult for Guest to under
stand at first was the scarcity of work, for idleness was
a disease which few of them had, and with everyone more
than willing to do whatever was necessary for the well-
being of the community, not enough actual work was avail
able to keep the people busy.
In the equalitarian state, in which no one was master
or slave, all the people shared in all the tasks that were
necessary to preserve the "euphoria" of the community.
Bach person did the task for which he was best fitted,
such as weaving or carving, but he also tended the commu
nity gardens to give himself the pleasure of participating
with his neighbors and to give himself necessary physical
exercise as a relief from what might be a sedentary occu
pation. Moderation was the rule in the twenty-first cen
tury, as Guest learned when Robert, the weaver, wanted
Dick to let him row the boat, since Dick was getting more
physical exercise than he needed, and the weaver, who liked
to row, warned Dick, "Ne quid nimis! Don't'overdo it!"
(XVI, 20).
The position of women in the new society was the most
natural one that the denizens could imagine. Old Hammond,
the student of history who prided himself on his knowledge
115
of the old regime in the nineteenth century, explained
simply to Guest:
The men have no longer any opportunity of tyrannising
over the women, or the women over the men ....
The women do what they can do best, and what they
like best, and the men are neither jealous of it or
injured by it. This is such a commonplace that I am
almost ashamed to state it. (XVI, 59)
Women were honored in this society because they had
the powers of reproducing the race, but as mothers they
no longer had the "artificial burdens of motherhood."
A mother has no longer any mere sordid anxieties for
the future of her children. They might indeed turn
out better or worse; they may disappoint her highest
hopes; such anxieties as these are a part of the min
gled pleasure and pain which goes to make up the life
of mankind. But at least she is spared the fear (it
was most commonly the certainty) that artificial dis
abilities would make her children something less than
men and women: she knows that they will live and act
according to the measure of their own faculties. (XVI,
61-62)
Marriage, with the people of the future, was far less
i
a burden than it had been to the nineteenth-century people
Morris did not say whether a marriage was a civil, reli
gious, or personal agreement among the people concerned.
People were married, but if they discovered, one or both,
that they no longer wished to stay married they simply
separated,and could be rejoined later if both so desired.
Possessiveness had ceased to be a passion with these peo
ple, and since neither marriage partner in any sense pos
sessed his mate, each had the power to seek happiness with
or without a marriage arrangement.
t
I __________________________ . . ■ ■ ■ . 1
116
Education (to "be discussed later) was of course equal
for both men and women; so everyone knew all the details
of life about him. "I found,” Guest said, “that women
knew as much about all these things as the men: eould
name a flower, and knew its qualities, could tell you the
habitat of such and such birds and fish, and the like”
(XVI, 171). Since no one was a specialist except as an
avocation, highly technical language did not exist; so
women, and children too, discussed with the men such
things as the weather, the hay-crop, and buildings, be
cause they were genuinely interested in them.
William Guest, of course, asked about the population
of the land and heard that it was about what it was at the
end of the nineteenth century, the chief difference being
that the population that was once concentrated into large
cities was now spread rather evenly over the entire is
land. Many people had also emigrated "to help populate
other countries— where we were wanted and were called
for" (XVI, 74).
To Guest, the outsider, the people whom he saw were
unusually handsome; old Hammond explained:
"Well, as to our looks, the English and Jutish blood,
which on the whole is predominant here, used not to
produce such beauty. But I think we have improved
it. I know a man who has a large collection of por
traits printed from photographs of the nineteenth cen
tury, and going over those and comparing them with
the everyday faces in these times, puts the improve
ment in our good looks beyond a doubt. Now there are
some who think it not too fantastic to connect this
increase of beauty directly with our freedom, and good
sense in the matters we have been speaking of: they
believe that a child born from the natural and healthy
love between a man and a woman, even if that be tran
sient, is likely to turn out better in all ways, and
especially in bodily beauty, than the birth of the re
spectable commercial marriage bed, or of the dull de
spair of the drudge of that system. They say, Pleas
ure begets pleasure. What do you think?” (XVI, 62-63)
The happiness of all the people amazed Guest until he
learned from old Hammond that finding pleasure in all
their work was the basis for their good spirits. Of
course no material reward could be given for work, but the
old man affirmed that they had something much better:
"The reward of labour is life. Is that not enough?” (XVI,
91)* But Guest wanted to know how especially good or tal
ented work was rewarded. This work, Hammond said, got
"the reward of creation. The wages which God gets" (XVI,
91). Then he explained how it was among them that all
work was pleasurable:
”... all work is now 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 actual work is not pleasant; or else
because it has grown into a pleasurable habit, as in
the case with what you may call mechanical work; and
lastly (and most of our work is of this kind) because
there is conscious sensuous pleasure in the work it
self; it is done, that is, by artists." (XVI, 92)
Old Hammond pointed out that the whole purpose of the
revolution of 1952 was to make people happy, and his soci£
ety must work to keep people as happy as the revolution
aries promised them they would be, lest a counter-revolu
tion set in. Man's natural energies were dissipated by
118
pleasurable and creative work, "And happiness without hap
py daily work is impossible," Hammond said.
"Most obviously true," said I . . . "but answer my
question, as to how you gained this happiness."
"Briefly," said he, "by the absence of artificial
coercion, and the freedom of every man to do what he
can do best, joined to the knowledge of what produc
tions of labour we really want. I must admit that
this knowledge we reached slowly and painfully."
(XVI, 92)
The people of this land liked simple fairy tales.
They had returned to a youthful age of the race when, like
children, the people took the leisure to use their imagin
ations. ". . . it is the child-like part of us that pro
duces works of the imagination. . . . At least let us
rejoice that we have got back our childhood again. I
drink to the days that are!" (XVI, 102)
Before William Guest was aware of any major change in
the people of his vision he noticed changes in the dwell
ings and in the villages along the Thames. Spanning the
river at Hammersmith were no longer the ugly, dirty iron
bridges of his own day but rather stone-arch bridges,
which were solid and graceful. Where his own London home
had stood
. . . was now a longish building with gable ends
turned away from the road, and long, traceried win
dows coming rather low down set in the wall that
faced us. It was very handsomely built of red brick
with a lead roof; and high above the windows there
ran a frieze of figure subjects in baked clay, very
well executed, and designed with a force and direct
ness which I had never noticed in modern work before.
(XVI, 13)
119
Once inside the house he discovered more medieval
characteristics:
. . . we were presently within doors, and standing in
a hall with a floor of marble mosaic and an open tim
ber roof. There were no windows on the side opposite
to the river, but arches below leading into chambers,
one of which showed a glimpse of a garden beyond, and-
above them a long space of wall gaily painted (in
fresco, I thought) with similar subjects to those of
the frieze outside; everything about the place was
handsome and generously solid as to material; and
though it was not very large . . . one felt in it
that exhilarating sense of space and freedom which
satisfactory architecture always gives to the unanx-
ious man who is in the habit of using his eyes. (XVI,
14)
Where, in the once-crowded cities, packed, multi
leveled tenements had existed, now G-uest saw something
very different. This was the scene near where King Street
had run in the nineteenth century:
There were houses about, some on the road, some
amongst the fields with pleasant lanes leading down
to them, and each surrounded by a teeming garden.
They were all pretty in design, and as solid as might
be, but countryfied in appearance, like yeomen's
dwellings; some of them of red brick like those by
the river, but more of timber and plaster, which were
by the necessity of their construction so like medi
aeval houses of the same materials that I fairly felt
as if I were alive in the fourteenth century ....
(XVI, 23)
Only a few of the large buildings extant in Morris's
day were still standing after the revolution. The Houses
of Parliament were used as storage buildings for the com
munity's manure, and the British Museum was still a repos
itory for books, but was seldom used except by rare schol
ars like old Hammond, the new day not being deeply
120
concerned with the reading, writing, or printing of books.
The Bishop of Ely’s castle was a pile of ruins respected
only as a reminder of how the rich people used to live.
Hampton Court was a dwelling place for anyone who wanted
to live there and was used as an inn. When Guest asked
why old Hammond lived near the British Museum:
”0, I don't know," said Dick, rather absently.
"He is getting old, certainly, for he is over a hun
dred and five, and no doubt he doesn't care about
moving. But of course he could live in a prettier
house if he liked: he is not obliged to live in one
place any more than any one else." (XVI, 52)
The people could and did move about considerably,
since no one owned any of the property and if they desired
to live where there was no cottage they organized a group
of neighbors and built a cottage, thus giving work to
builders, carvers, thatchers, glazers, and masons, who
would take time from tending the fields around their
houses to ply their avocations.
As the travelers moved up the Thames, Guest felt with
every mile more of his youth returning to him; they came
on the site of Hampton Court:
At last we came to a reach of the river where on
the left hand a very pretty little village with some
old houses in it came down to the edge of the water,
over which was a ferry; and beyond these houses the
elm-blest meadows ended in a fringe of tall willows,
while on the right hand went the tow-path and a clear
space before a row of trees, which rose up behind
huge and ancient, the ornaments of a great park: but
these drew back still further from the river at the
end of the reach to make way for a little town of
quaint and pretty houses, some new, some old, domi
nated by the long walls and sharp gables of a great
121
red-brick pile of building, partly of tlie latest
Gothic, partly of the court style of Dutch William,
but so blended together by the bright sun and beau
tiful surroundings, including the bright blue river,
which it looked down upon, that even amidst the
beautiful buildings of that new happy time it had a
strange charm about it. A great wave of fragrance,
amidst which the lime-tree blossom was clearly to be
distinguished, came down to us from its unseen
gardens. . .. ” (XYI, 144-145)
Most of the small dwellings were "panelled and
I
earved" and were invariably neat and clean, newly white
washed, and very simple in their furnishings, which con
sisted of only necessities and few personal belongings
since the inhabitants might want to leave permanently at
any time to enjoy living in a different part of the land
and did not want to be burdened then with anything un
wieldy. Clothes, furniture, food, and anything else neces
sary to their ways of life were available at local markets
for the simple trouble of picking them up, as Guest dis
covered when he needed clothes or a pipe and tobacco.
In place of the ugly factories and mine dumps and
slag heaps Guest saw forests and grazing areas, and land
again used for the advantage of mankind rather than "cov
ering it with factories for making things that nobody
wants, which was the chief business of the nineteenth
century" (XYI, 74).
Guest greatly enjoyed the simple food with which he
was provided, but he carefully avoided mentioning specif
ically what they ate. At meal times the people in London
122
went to large dining halls where each person was handed a
small hunch of fresh flowers as he entered the room.
Guest was much more interested in detailing the medieval
crockery, the handmade glassware, and the pictures of
fairy-tale subjects on the walls than in stating specifi
cally what was cooked. He made clear that they ate sim
ple food; he once mentioned a cabbage leaf full of straw
berries fresh from the fields, that the women had picked
for his breakfast, and for another breakfast he was given
bread and milk. He said of his first meal:
. . . we fell to on our breakfast, which was simple
enough but most delicately cooked, and set on the
table with much daintiness. The bread was particu
larly good, and was of several different kinds, from
the big, rather close, dark-coloured, sweet-tasting
farmhouse loaf, which was most to my liking, to the
thin pipe-stems of wheaten crust, such as I have
eaten in Turin. (XVI, 15)
Hear the end of their river journey they were bidden
to supper at the country cottage of some strangers who in
vited the travelers in as they would invite in anyone who
was hungry:
Everything to eat and drink, though it was some
what different to what we had had in London, was
better than good, but the old man eyed rather sulk
ily the chief dish on the table, on which lay a
leash of fine perch, and said:
"H'm, perch! I am sorry we can’t do better for
you guests. The time was when we might have had a
good piece of salmon up from London for you; but
the times have grown mean and petty.” (XVI, 149)
This old man was the one disgruntled person whom
Guest saw in his dream. The narrator told that only a
123
few dissatisfied persons existed, and this unhappy one
asked Guest if in his country the competitive system ob
tained. (The old man liked books, which the old dispen
sation produced, in contrast to the booklessness that his
contemporaries found in their heaven on earth.)
"Heaven?" said he: "you like heaven, do you?"
"Yes," said I . . . .
"Well, I am far from sure that I do," quoth he.
"I think one may do more with one's life than sitting
[sic] on a damp cloud and singing hymns."
I was rather nettled by this inconsequence, and
said: "Well, neighbor, to be short and without using
metaphors, in the land whence I came, where the com
petition which produced those literary works which
you admire so much is still the rule, most people are
thoroughly unhappy; here, to me at least, most people
seem thoroughly happy." (XVI, 152)
The clothes worn by the people in this new world sug
gested a fresh medieval look, very pleasing to the narra
tor. The first person whom Guest met when he awakened at
the river's edge was Dick Hammond, who at the moment was
enjoying the privilege of some physical work as a boatman
for anyone who would like conveyance on the river.
His dress was not like any modern workaday clothes I
had seen, but would have served very well as a cos
tume for a picture of fourteenth century life: it
was of dark blue cloth, simple enough, but of fine
web, and without a stain on it. He had a brown
leather belt around his waist, and I noticed that
its clasp was of damascened steel beautifully
wrought. (XVI, 7-8)
After his early-morning bath Guest saw another young
man who wanted to pilot Dick's boat.
His dress also was of the same cut as the first man's,
though somewhat gayer, the surcoat being light green
with a golden spray embroidered on the breast, and
124
his belt being of filagree silver-work. (XYI, 12)
William Guest was soon introduced to the handsome,
healthy, strong young women, who would serve breakfast to
the three men:
As to their dress, which of course I took note of, I
should say that they were decently veiled with dra
pery, and not bundled up with millinery; that they
were clothed like women, not upholstered like arm
chairs, as most women of our time are. In short,
their dress was somewhat between that of the ancient
classical costume and the simpler forms of the four
teenth century garments, though it was clearly not
an imitation of either: the materials were light
and gay to suit the season. (XYI, 14)
The gray, browns, and blacks of nineteenth-century
London had given way to gay and bright raiments in the new
era, Clara pointed out, because nothing in Nowhere got
clothes dirty. Morris did make clear that London was
cleaner because no industrial smoke, waste, and soot any
longer made the city grimy, but he did not explain how
unpaved streets were eleaner than paved ones. Morris cer
tainly implied that the factories and industrial plants
that made the cities dirty forced the people of his day
to wear dark clothes like upholstering rather than the
light clothes and sandals which people in a clean society
wore.
When Guest, Dick, and Clara made themselves ready for
their trip up the Thames Guest was given a beautiful suit
of blue. Clara wore a light silk embroidered gown, which,
he said, "to my eyes was extravagantly gay and bright;
125
while Dick was . . . dressed in a white flannel prettily
embroidered.*’ Along the river they saw farm girls clad in
light woolen garments, gaily embroidered, and they were
usually barefooted or wore light sandals. He enjoyed the
suntanned appearance of both the boys and the girls, who
seemed so much healthier than the white-skinned people of
his own day. They had, as a society, discovered the joy
of colors, something, as he said repeatedly, that the peo
ple of his day had not found because they had lost their
instinct for beauty. This instinct had been joyously re
covered when people had the leisure to contemplate the
beauty of the earth and themselves as genuinely natural
parts of it.
William Guest frequently inquired into the institu
tions of the ideal society. Although the setting was Eng
land of the future, he rarely called it by any name, and
he did not refer to it as a country, for it was not organ
ized on any kind of national basis. He recognized no kind
of government in a populous area or in the rural parts of
the land. No individual had power over any other person.
Public poliey was decided, say for the building of a new
bridge, by a group of interested people who met together
and discussed the pro's and con's; if a majority wanted
to go to the work of building the bridge they were allowed
to proceed, and they might try to convince their neighbors
who represented the minority why they wanted the bridge.
126
One would assume that if so much of the ethos of the
fourteenth century obtained among these people certainly
the fourteenth-century church or some church would be im
portant to them, but Morris mentioned no church. He
called their equalitarian respect for one another a reli
gion of humanity and was critical of the religious atti
tudes of both the medieval period and of the nineteenth
century. "... they made their G-od a tormentor and a
jailer rather than anything else," Guest said of the medi
eval people, but Dick said that in reading history about
the nineteenth century he saw little improvement, for:
After all the Mediaeval folk acted after their con
science, as your remark about their God (which is
true) shows, and they were ready to bear what they
inflicted upon others; whereas the nineteenth century
ones were hypocrites, and pretended to be humane, and
yet went on tormenting those whom they dared to treat
so by shutting them up in prison, for no reason at
all, except that they were what they themselves, the
prison-masters, had forced them to be." (XVI, 43-44)
Prisons did not exist because there was no civil law,
and no one was branded a criminal for any deed; so no pun
ishment existed. Guest told one story of two men fighting
over a girl. The man who had made himself unpleasant to
the girl whom both men loved was killed by the third mem
ber of the triangle. The neighbors knew and understood
the situation and would do nothing to the innocent man who
had killed his neighbor, but the conscience of the man who
struck the other down so troubled him for this violation
of their rule of moderation that the community worried____
127
that he might destroy himself, and they felt that if he
did the girl would do the same.
"It is very unhappy," said Dick; "hut since the
man is dead, and cannot he brought to life again, and
since the slayer had no malice in him, I cannot for
the life of me see why he shouldn't get over it be
fore long. Besides it was the right man that was
killed and not the wrong. Why should a man brood
over a mere accident for ever? And the girl? (XVI,
166)
i
Divorce courts did not exist because, as has been
previously explained, people stayed married so long as
they were happy together. Morris thought that most di
vorces were concerned with matters of property, and since
no private property existed, neither did the need for di
vorce.
The family was the basic unit of society, but any
member of a family might go and live where and with whom
he pleased. It was expressly agreed that no one was to
be kept away from any house where he wanted to live. No
individual was allowed to disturb the equanimity of a
household, and no person could be turned away so long as
he did not make for an unhappy situation.
Formal education was not a part of the new society.
The word "school" to them referred to a school of herring
or a school of artists, but they did not know the meaning
of a school for children. When Guest asked about the sys
tem of education he was told that none existed, and he had
to explain that to him education meant a system for
128
teaching young people.
"Why not old people also?" said he [hick] with a
twinkle in his eye. "But," he went on, "I can assure
you our children learn whether they go through a 'sys
tem of teaching1 or not. Why, you will not find one
of these children about here, boy or girl, who can
not swim; and everyone of them has been used to tum
bling about the little forest ponies— there's one of
them now! They all of them know how to cook; the
bigger lads can mow; many can thatch and do odd jobs
at carpentering; or they know how to keep shop. I
can tell you they know plenty of things." (XVI, 29)
When Guest asked about their mental education he
heard:
"I understand you to be speaking of book-learning;
and as to that it is a simple affair. Most children,
seeing books lying about, manage to read by the time
they are four.years old; though I am told it has not
always been so. As to writing, we do not encourage
them to scrawl too early (though scrawl a little they
will), because it gets them into a habit of uglyvwrit-
ing; and what's the use of a lot of ugly writing being
done, when rough printing can be done so easily. You
understand that handsome writing we like, and many
people will write their books out when they make them,
or get them written; I mean books of which only a few
copies are needed— poems, and such like, you know."
(XVI, 29)
Children learned French, German, Welsh, and Irish
from the children of foreign visitors (". . . the little
ones get together and rub their speech into one another"),
and they also learned Latin and Greek. "And history?"
said I, "how do you teach history?"
"Well," said he, "when a person can read, of course
he reads what he likes to; and he can easily get some
one to tell him what are the best books to read on
such or such a subject, or to explain what he doesn't
understand in the books when he is reading them."
(XVI, 30)
Guest asked what happened if they learned no history,
129
and he was told that little interest in history actually
existed among them; so, as was their general rule, people
read history if they pleased, but they became educated to
exactly the degree and in what subjects they desired.
Little reading, except for story books, was done generally
before the age of about fifteen because bookishness was
not encouraged. Dick explained:
M. . . you will find some children who will take to
books very early; which perhaps is not good for them;
but it's no use thwarting them; and very often it
doesn’t last long with them, and they find their lev
el before they are twenty years old. You see, chil
dren are mostly given to imitating their elders, and
when they see most people about them engaged in gen
uinely amusing work, like house-building and street
paving, and gardening, and the like, that is what
they want to be doing; so I don't think we need fear
having too many book-learned men." (XVI, 31)
Old Hammond, who was eminently aware of history, de
fended the kind of education that Dick described above by
arguing the value of its simple and natural approach in
contrast to what he knew of education in the nineteenth
century:
". . .1 understand your point of view about educa
tion, which is that of times past, when 'struggle for
life,’ as men used to phrase it (i.e., the struggle
for a slave's rations on one side, and for a bounc
ing share of the slaveholders' privilege on the
other), pinched 'education' for most people into a
niggardly dole of not very accurate information;
something to be swallowed by the beginner in the art
of living whether he liked it or not, and was hungry
for it or not; and which had been chewed and digested
over and over again by people who didn't care about
it in order to serve it out to other people who
didn't care about it." (XVI, 63)
As the boating party moved up the Thames and lay at
130
Datchet lock, Dick volunteered some nineteenth-century in
formation about Eton College that he had learned from his
old kinsman:
". . . they treated them in a very simple way, and
instead of teaching poor men's sons to know some
thing, they taught rich men's sons to know nothing.
It seems from what he says that it was a place for
the 'aristocracy' (if you know what that word means;
I have been told its meaning) to get rid of the com
pany of their male children for a great part of the
year." (XVI, 160)
The buildings of Eton were extant and used as dwell
ing places for people engaged in learning. Anyone could
visit Eton and be taught by the scholars in residence,
but no process of education or any rewards like degrees
were part of the school. Its chief value seemed to lie
in its collection of "the best books."
Guest, as they passed Oxford on the river, could not
refrain from asking if the ancient university was still a
seat of learning.
"Still?" said he, smiling. "Well, it has reverted
to some of its best traditions; so you may imagine
how far it is from its nineteenth-century position.
It is real learning, knowledge cultivated for its own
sake— the Art of Knowledge, in short— which is fol
lowed there, not the Commercial learning of the past.
Though perhaps you do not know that in the nineteenth
century Oxford and its less interesting sister Cam
bridge became definitely commercial. They (and espe
cially Oxford) were the breeding places of a peculiar
class of parasites, who called themselves cultivated
people; they were indeed cynical enough, as the so-
called educated classes of the day generally were;
but they affected an exaggeration of cynicism in or
der that they might be thought knowing and worldly
wise. The rich middle classes (they had no relation
with the working classes) treated them with the kind
of contemptuous toleration with which a mediaeval________
1 31
baron treated his jester; though it must be said that
they were by no means so pleasant as the old jesters
were, being, in fact, the bores of society. They
were laughed at, despised— and paid. Which last was
what they aimed at." (XVI, 70)
Money, and any desire to gain a great amount of it or
to gain power for having it, did not exist at the end of
the twenty-first century, lot even a barter system was
practiced. Most of the people raised their own food, made
their houses and furnishings, and then engaged in handi
crafts. Their artistic creations, whose reward for making
was in the creating of things beautiful, were taken to
shops to be given to anyone who found them useful and
beautiful. Many shops were to be found in towns and vil
lages as outlets for these handicrafts because most of the
people had the leisure to be artistic, and they enjoyed
creating, so that the shops were full of a great variety
of beautiful things that satisfied the people's aesthetic
cravings. Shops, without the complications of money and
the profit element, were such simple things to operate that
children usually attended them when they were not doing
more healthful work in the fields. Grown-ups had almost
completely cured themselves of the disease of Idleness,
which usually attended unhealthy people. Being strong and
healthy the people wanted to work and had, actually, to
look for outside work to do, the labor supply being larger
than the job opportunities, but no such thing as unemploy
ment existed either, for housing and food were never
132
denied anyone simply because he didn't work. He was
ashamed not to work if he were capable.
Hammond, the old scholar of the history of the nine
teenth century, explained the system to his interested
visitor:
"The wares which we make are made because they are
needed: men make for their neighbours' use as if
they were making for themselves, not for a vague mar
ket of which they know nothing, and over which they
have no control: as there is no buying and selling,
it would be mere insanity to make goods on the chance
of their being wanted; for there is no longer anyone
who can be compelled to buy them. So that whatever
is made is good, and thoroughly fit for its purpose.
Nothing can be made except for genuine use; therefore
no inferior goods are made. Moreover, as aforesaid,
we have now found out what we want, so we make no
more than we want; and as we are not driven to make
a vast quantity of useless things, we have time and
resources enough to consider our pleasure in making
them. All work which would be irksome to do by hand
is done by immensely improved machinery; and in all
work which it is a pleasure to do by hand machinery
is done without. There is no difficulty in finding
work which suits the special turn of mind of every
body; so that no man is sacrificed to the wants of
another. From time to time, when we have found out
that some piece of work was too disagreeable or
troublesome, we have given it up and done altogether
without the thing produced by it. Now surely you can
understand that under these circumstances all the
work that we do is an exercise of the mind and body
more or less pleasant to be done: so that instead
of avoiding work everybody seeks it: and since peo
ple have got defter in doing the work generation
after generation, it has become so easy to do, that
it seems as if there were less done, though probably
more is produced. I suppose this explains that fear,
which I hinted at just now, of a possible scarcity
in work, which perhaps you have already noticed, and
which is a feeling on the increase. ..." (XVI, 97)
Production, then, was based upon the people's needs,
and there was no wasteful overproduction of anything.
133
Tithe-barns were maintained against a possible crop fail
ure in another area, and anyone in need was free to take
whatever he needed from community stores in exactly the
way that a man could get a new suit, or tobacco, from a
shop.
Most goods were produced in homes by families or by
individuals whose special talents or desires led them to
create; instead of anything like factories were then the
Banded-workshops where those who wanted to work together
met to share their interests and to use equipment that
might not normally be found in a home. Those who worked
in pottery and glass, for instance, might have a Banded-
workshop with a "fair-sized kiln" and the other tools and
facilities for making glass and pots. They believed it
"would be ridiculous if a man had a liking for pot-making
or glass-blowing that he should have to live in one place
or be obliged to forego the work he liked" (XVI, 46).
Middlemen of any kind did not exist, for they thought
it important that the farmer or the handicrafter have con
tact with the person who used his product; the producer
being proud of what he had created gave himself the pleas
ure of seeing another take pleasure in the labor of his
hands.
William Guest found some lessons hard to learn among
his new friends. Such words as "cost" and "afford" were
I
not in their vocabularies, and the nineteenth-century
134
visitor, who had been conscious of cost all his life, fre
quently found himself stirring the people when he brought
up economic questions which were not relevant to their
scheme of things. He was surprised, for instance, at the
richness and beauty of their clothes, and he said on one
occasion to Clara and Dick:
"... how can everybody afford such costly garments?
Look! there goes a middle-aged man in a sober gray
dress; but I can see from here that it is made of very
fine woolen stuff, and is covered with silk embroi
dery. "
Said Clara: "He could wear shabby clothes if he
pleased,— that is, if he didn’t think he would hurt
people's feelings by doing so."
"But please tell me," I said, "how can they afford
it?"
As soon as I had spoken I perceived that I had got
back to my old blunder; for I saw Dick's shoulders
shaking with laughter; but he wouldn't say a word,
but handed me over to the tender mercies of Clara,
who said:
"Why, I don't know what you mean. Of course we
can afford it, or else we shouldn't do it. It would
be easy enough for us to say, we will spend our la
bour on making our clothes comfortable: but we don't
choose to stop there. Why do you find fault with us?
Does it seem to you as if we starved ourselves for
food in order to make ourselves fine clothes? or do
you think there is anything wrong in liking to see
the coverings of our bodies beautiful like our bodies
are?— just as a deer's or an otter's skin has been
made beautiful from the first? Come, what is wrong
with you?"
I bowed before the storm, and mumbled out some
excuse or other. I must say, I might have known
that people who were so fond of architecture gener
ally, would not be backward in ornamenting themselves;
all the more as the shape of their raiment, apart
from its colour, was both beautiful and reasonable—
veiling the form, without either muffling or carica
turing it. (XVI, 138-139)
Time was all they had to spend and "to afford" meant
jto expend their energies creatively; time could not be
135
wasted in artistic endeavors.
The economy of the new society was agrarian and was
based upon satisfying the physical and aesthetic needs of
all the people. These needs were satisfied by the hand-
labors of the people, who needed no machines to keep the
earth productive and beautiful. Like the earth, they
tried to be productive and beautiful.
Government, in the senses that the nineteenth-century
man understood the term, did not exist in Morris' ideal
human society. Royalty, parliament, people's elected rep
resentatives, mayors, councilmen— none of these existed.
Families disciplined their children, but even here great
freedom was the rule. As early as possible children began
helping in the fields, and they were stimulated by the ex
amples of the rest of society to become artistically crea
tive, bending themselves only toward the needs of their
peers and a satisfying fullness of life for each individ
ual .
Rivalry among nations had disappeared because equal
ity was the rule over the world. After the revolution of
1952 the former inequality "betwixt man and man in soci
ety" disappeared over the entire earth, so that no ethnic
groups or geographical clusters called themselves nations
or tried to stimulate patriotism with their "foolish and
envious prejudices" (XVI, 85).
Political strife was no longer a problem since no
1 36
polities existed. When Guest suggested that political
strife was the necessary result of human nature, old Ham
mond had a ready answer:
"Human nature I" cried the old hoy, impetuously; "what
human nature? The human nature of paupers, of slaves, of
slave-holders, or the human nature of wealthy freemen?”
(XVI, 86-87).
Differences seldom existed among the people, hut when
they did, as has already heen pointed out, they were set
tled hy the will of the majority. Repeatedly Guest was
told that in a society in which men were free and equal,
differences seldom arose. If on any particular matter of
policy, say, as to whether a new town-hall should he
huilt, a very narrow majority voted one way or the other,
the matter was allowed to lapse, the minority generally^
yielding in a friendly manner.
"But do you know,” said I, "that there.is some
thing in all this very like democracy; and I thought
that democracy was considered to he in a moribund
condition many, many years ago.”
The old hoy’s eye twinkled. "I grant you that our
methods have that drawback. But what is to he done?
We can’t get anyone amongst us to complain of his not
always having his own way in the teeth of the commu
nity, when it is clear that everybody cannot have
that indulgence. What is^ to “ be done?"
’ ’ Well,” said I, "I don’t know.”
Said he: ’ ’The only alternative to our method that
I can conceive of are these. First that we should
choose out, or breed, a elass of superior persons
capable of judging on all matters without consulting
the neighbours; that, in short, we should get for
ourselves what used to he called an aristocracy of
intellect; or, secondly, for the purpose of safe
guarding the freedom of the individual will, we should
157
revert to a system of private property again, and
have slaves and slave-holders once more. What do
you think of these two expedients?"
"Well," said I, "there is a third possibility—
to wit, that every man should be quite independent
of every other, and that thus the tyranny of society
should be abolished."
He looked hard at me for a second or two, and then
burst out laughing very heartily; and I confess that
I joined him. When he recovered himself he nodded at
me, and said: "Yes, yes, I quite agree with you—
and so we all do." (XVI, 89)
Then the old man summed up the system:
"A terrible tyranny our Communism, is it not? Folk
used often to be warned against this very unhappiness
in times past, when for every well-fed, contented per
son you saw a thousand miserable starvelings. Where
as for us, we grow fat and well-liking on the tyranny;
a tyranny, to say the truth, not to be made visible
by any microscope I know. Don't be afraid, my friend;
we are not going to seek for troubles by calling our
peace and plenty and happiness by ill names whose
meaning we have forgotten!" (XYI, 90)
Ho organized religion or system of worshiping any
thing extra-earthly occupied any part of Morris’s new so
ciety. After the world had been brought to its second
birth, following the terrible revolution in the middle of
the twentieth century, all hierarchies were rejected, even
the old spiritual ones that nineteenth-century man remem
bered as important to the people of the Middle Ages. Mor
ris approached the religious problem only briefly, when
he had old Hammond explain:
"More akin to our way of looking at life was the
spirit of the Middle Ages, to whom heaven and the
life of the next world was [sic] such a reality, that
it became to them a part of the life upon the earth;
which accordingly they loved and adorned, in spite of
the ascetic doctrines of their formal creed, which
bade them contemn it.
138
"But that also with its assured belief in heaven**1
and hell as two countries in which to live, has gone,
and now we do, both in word and in deed., believe in
the continuous life of the world of men, and as it
were, add every day of that common life to the little
stock of days which our own mere individual experi
ence wins for us: and consequently we are happy. Do
you wonder at it? In times past, indeed, men were
told to love their kind, to believe in the religion
of humanity and so forth. But look you, just in the
degree that a man had elevation of mind and refine
ment enough to be able to value this idea, was he re
pelled by the obvious aspect of the individuals com
posing the mass which he was to worship; and he could
only evade that repulsion by making a conventional
abstraction of mankind that had little actual or his
torical relation to the race; which to his eyes was
divided into blind tyrants on the one hand and apa
thetic degraded slaves on the other. But now, where
is the difficulty in accepting the religion of hu
manity, when the men and women who go to make up hu
manity are free, happy, and energetic at least, and
most commonly beautiful of body also, and surrounded
by beautiful things of their own fashioning, and a
nature bettered and not worsened by contact with man
kind? This is what this age of the world has re
served for us." (XYI, 132-133)
God was mentioned but once in News from Nowhere, by
the old man who explained the utopian system to the visi
tor. When the latter asked if especially good work was
rewarded, the old man replied that it was granted "the
reward of creation. The wages which God gets. .. . ”
(XVI, 91). God was the creative foree which had created
men and the universe but who was not worshiped in creed or
church. Like the people in Morris's dream, God was a cre
ative artist who in making the earth experienced "the re
ward of creation."
"... this is not an age of inventions," an inhabit
ant of Morris’s "green world" told the visitor as the end
139
of the journey approached. The people who brought about
the revolution in the previous century did not choose to
perpetuate the tyranny of machinery that had dominated the
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The successful
rebels believed that instead of proving to be labor-saving
devices machines had actually increased man’s servitude
because the owners of the machinery used their mechanical
advantage, as it were, to make have-nots operate the ma
chines for slave wages to make the owners rich. Worse
than this, however, was the dependence that all of mankind
placed on machines, thus denying themselves the pleasures
of work and creativity. Artistic creativity had allowed
man to rediscover in himself the instinct for beauty which
he had lost in the machine age, and he knew that wherever
machines appeared beauty disappeared.
They happened to be passing through one of the locks
of the Thames when Guest asked where the old mechanical
locks were:
"I believe . . . that some time ago (I can't give you
a date) some elaborate machinery was used for the
locks. . . . However, it was troublesome, I suppose,
and the simple hatches, and the gates, with a big
counterpoising beam, were found to answer every pur
pose, and were easily mended when wanted with mater
ials always to hand: so here they are, as you see."
"Besides," said Dick, "this kind of lock is pret
ty, as you can see; and I can't help thinking that
your machine-lock, winding up like a watch, would
have been ugly and would have spoiled the look of
the river: and that is surely reason enough for keep
ing such locks as these. Good-bye, old fellow!" said
he to the lock as he pushed us out through the now
open gates by a vigorous stroke of the boat-hook.________
140
"May you live long, and have your green old age re
newed forever 1" (XYI, 170)
When the visitor inquired about things scientific in
the happy land he learned that some little interest in it
existed toward the end of making wares, but no longer was
it the controlling force which denied man the delight of
life in his natural world. When, with the rebirth, man
found himself passionately in love again with the earth
itself, science declined; the new spirit of the times was
the love of the earth similar to the love that one felt
for his beloved.
"All other modds save this had been exhausted: the
unceasing criticism, the boundless curiosity in the
ways and thoughts of man, which was the mood of the
ancient Greek, to whom these things were not so much
a means, as an end, was gone past recovery; nor had
there been really any shadow of it in the so-called
science of the nineteenth century, which as you must
know, was in the main an appendage to the police of
that system. In spite of appearances, it was lim
ited and cowardly, because it did not really believe
in itself. It was the outcome, as it was the sole
relief, of the unhappiness of the period which made
life so bitter even to the rich, and which, as you
may see with your own bodily eyes, the great change
has swept away." (XYI, 132)
One nod, little more than a suggestion, toward a
scientific advance was the "force-barge" that Guest saw on
the river. Men walked from one place to the other, or' k. - :
used horses to pull wagons or carriages, and rowed or
used sailing craft on the waterways. The visitor remem
bered steam-craft on the rivers and railroad trains, but
these had disappeared. But to his surprise one day on the
141
upper reaches of the Thames he saw "barges, laden with hay
or other country produce, or carrying bricks, lime, tim
ber, and the like, and these were going on their way with
out any means of propulsion visible to me— just a man at
the tiller. ..." "Dick . . . said, ’That is one of our
force-barges; it is quite as easy to work vehicles by
force by water as by hand’” (XVI, 162). Guest, however,
asked no questions about them because he could not under
stand how they worked, and he didn't want to betray his
l
ignorance. This was the only mention of the use of me
chanical power in the story, and he never explained how
the Bordeaux wine or the Latakia tobacco was imported; we
assume that they came via sailing ships.
Other peoples of the earth seemed to have had the
same kind of revolution and rebirth that Guest experienced
in this fresh land except the dwellers in what was once
jNorth America, who had not yet attained a new equilibrium.
Americans, once so dependent on things scientific, were
more greatly affected by the change to a non-scientific
world than were any other people. These are the only for
eigners about whom anything was said:
"Those lands which were once the colonies of Great
Britain, for instance, and especially America— that
part of it, above all, which was once the United
States— are now and will be for a long while a great
resource to us. For these lands, and, I say, espe
cially the northern parts of America, suffered so
terribly from the last days of civilisation, and
became such horrible places to live in, that they
are now very backward in all that makes life pleasant.
142
Indeed, one may say that for nearly a hundred years
the people of the northern parts of America have "been
engaged in gradually making a dwelling-place out of a
stinking dust-heap; and there is still a great deal
to do, especially as the country is so big." (XYI, 98)
The chief characteristic of the new society, and that
which contrasted it most sharply with the nineteenth cen
tury, was that it was a happy society, as Morris said so
many times with so many different examples. The main rea
son for its happiness was the creative pleasure that men
had discovered in their work, the artistic consciousness
i
of which the entire population was joyously aware. Old
Hammond tried to explain to William Guest that one of the
chief problems facing the people after the revolution was
that men might become dull for having too much time for
thought and idle musingi
"Probably from what I have told you before, you will
have a guess at the remedy for such a disaster; re
membering always that many of the things which used
to be produced— slave-wares for the poor and mere
wealth-wasting wares for rich— ceased to be made.
That remedy was, in short, the production of what
used to be called art, but which has no name amongst
us now, because it has become a necessary part of
the labour of every man who produces."
Said T: "What! had men any time or opportunity
for cultivating the fine arts amidst the desperate
struggle for life and freedom that you have told me of?"
Said Hammond: "You must suppose that the form of
art was founded chiefly on the memory of the art of
the past; although, strange to say, the civil war was
much less destructive of art than of other things,
and though what of art existed under the old forms,
revived in a wonderful way during the latter part
of the struggle, especially as regards music and
poetry. The art or work-pleasure, as one ought to
call it, of which I am now speaking, sprung up almost
spontaneously, it seems, from a kind of instinct
143
amongst people, no longer driven desperately to pain
ful and terrible overwork, to do the best they could
with the work in hand— to make it excellent of its
kind; and when that had gone on for a little, a crav
ing for beauty seemed to awaken in men's minds, and
they began rudely and awkwardly to ornament the wares
which they had made; and when they had once set to
work at that, it soon began to grow. All this was
much helped by the abolition of the squalor which our
immediate ancestors put up with so coolly; and by the
leisurely, but not stupid, country-life which now
grew (as I told you before) to be common amongst us.
Thus at last and by slow degrees we got pleasure into
our work; then we became conscious of that pleasure,
and cultivated it, and took care that we had our fill
of it; and then all was gained, and we were happy.
So may it be for ages and ages!" (XVI, 133-134)
The characteristic happiness of both old and young
people in the new dispensation may be summed up in two
quotations, the first by Ellen, the pretty girl whom the
party met near the end of their journey. She spoke to her
grandfather with whom she lived, by preference, in a cot
tage rather than in a large dwelling-place along with
many other people:
"You, grandfather, have done no hard work for years
now, but wander about and read your books and have
nothing to worry you; and as for me, I work hard when
I like it, because I like it, and think it does me
good, and knits up my muscles, and makes me prettier
to look at, and healthier and happier. But in those
past days you, grandfather, would have had to work
hard after you were old; and would have been always
afraid of having to be shut up in a kind of prison
along with other old men, half-starved and without
amusement. And as for me, I am twenty years old.
In those days my middle age would be beginning now,
and in a few years I should be pinched, thin, and
haggard, beset with troubles and miseries, so that
no one could have guessed that I was once a beauti
ful girl." (XVI, 158)
The other observation was offered by an old man
144
named Morsom:
11. . . we have learned the trick of handicraft, and
have added the utmost refinement of workmanship to
the freedom of fancy and imagination. “
I looked, and wondered indeed at the deftness and
abundance of beauty of the work of men who had at
last learned to accept life itself as a pleasure,
and the satisfaction of the common needs of mankind
and the preparation for them, as work fit for the
best of the race. (XVI, 180)
Morris developed two characteristics of the ideal hu
man society in News from Nowhere and in The House of the
Wolfings, which he had barely more than mentioned in his
lectures and in A Dream of John Ball. These last two
characteristics will be numbered thirteen and fourteen.
13. Communal Living
By "communal living" Morris meant the kind of life
that was enjoyed by a group of people who lived together
in an interdependent existence, usually in a bucolic set
ting. His best example of communal living is to be found
in The House of the Wolfings where the people of the Mid
mark lived as a closely knit tribe in one large building.
All the men, women, and children ate, slept, and worked
in the Roof, as it was called. There they practiced their
simple arts of decorating, carving, and weaving; there
they listened to the songs about their heroes; there they
decided policies about what the people of the Midmark
should do. The commune of Midmarken had their own cattle,
and they tilled as a group the fertile acres which they
i
jhad cleared between the Roof and the river called the
145
Mirkwood.
Each person under the Roof had his own responsibili
ties which he discharged faithfully, each task an almost
religious obligation to the life of the tribe. Ho hier
archy of social order existed in the tribe, for communal
living demanded absolute social equality.
Ne^wB from Nowhere furnished another example of commu
nal living in the people who lived happily together in the
Hammersmith house on the Thames in the twenty-first cen
tury. The men and women dwelt together in the house as
did the Wolfings, but theirs was a commune that was a pas
toral enclave near London. Their chief function seemed to
be that of offering hospitality to passing guests and to
visitors who wanted to refresh themselves. They had their
own gardens, which furnished food for those who lived
there, and they, like the Wolfings, enjoyed creative
artistry.
Communal living allowed people of common interest to
live together. Families as such did not exist within a
commune, but all of the people constituted a large family
(or tribe) and enjoyed the utmost personal freedom in
their daily lives together. Among the Wolfings no one
left the tribe, but the individuals at Hammersmith were
free to come and go. In both groups the happiness of each
person was very important to all others in the society,
and each member seemed willing to make any sacrifice for
146
the good of any one of his fellows.
14. Use of Artistic Decoration
Morris described some little use of artistic decora
tion in the homes of the Kentish people about whom he
dreamed in A Dream of John Ball, but he stressed the im
portance of artistic decoration among the Wolfings as well
as in the Hammersmith house in Hews from Howhere. People
who lived closely together, he seemed to say, learned art
istry from one another and then spent a considerable part
of their leisure time in decorating their dwellings. They
carved utensils, furniture, toys, and even the woodwork of
their dwelling places. They wove tapestries and made
their own clothing. Some of the people painted walls and
beams with intricate patterns and designs. They seemed
never to tire of being artistically creative and were nev
er happier than when they were adding an artistic touch to
anything in their households.
Morris believed that art raised the moral level of a
person or of a group of people living together so that
these artistically creative people enjoyed a high moral
existence. Artistic decoration served no useful end what
soever. Those who could decorate were urged to do so for
the joy that they found in being creative. Morris held no
person in more esteem than the creative individual; his
ideal human society provided rich opportunities for artis
tic creativity by all the happy artist-members.
CHAPTER IV
No consistent pattern of critical opinions on Mor
ris ' s works dealt with in this study is discoverable; that
is, much was printed concerning News from Nowhere both
when the work appeared and subsequently, but comparatively
little has been printed concerning A Dream of John Ball;
although the lectures were recognized frequently in criti
cal journals, little was written that will throw light on
the particular topic of this study; The House of the Wolf
ings was mentioned by many journals both in England and in
America when it appeared, but most of the reviews merely
summarized the story and commented on the aesthetic qual
ities of the work. News from Nowhere has been and is the
one of his works that has continued to challenge critics
and admirers since it was issued serially in The Common
weal between January 11 and October 4, 1890; so, of
course, more opinions concerning this work will be cited
than can be for any of the others.
One of the earliest reviews of Morris's lectures,
Hopes and Pears for Art. was written by Edith Simcox and
appeared in The Eortnightly Review (London), Volume 37,
for June 1882, pages 28-30. She had read Ruskin's chapter
"The Nature of G-othic" from his Stones of Venice, from
147 ________________
143
which Morris had taken so many of his ideas about the hap
py workman. She was deeply concerned about Morris’s hope
for ideal conditions under whieh the laboring man would
find opportunity for pleasureful work amidst beautiful
surroundings and contrasted Huskin’s despair, of 1853,
with Morris’s hopefulness, three decades later:
. . . the despairing tone of Mr. Ruskin, and the -
qualified but unextinguished hopefulness of Mr. Morris,
are both justified by the social preconceptions which
determine their attitude toward the practical problems
of art and industry.
*
Many times, as his letters revealed, Morris, too, de
spaired of ever seeing in his own time the laboring condi
tions of which both he and Ruskin dreamed, but the essen
tial difference between the two men was that Ruskin ob
served the conditions of labor in his day, but he sug
gested no program for changing them; a good part of Mor
ris’s life was spent trying to change labor conditions so
that a laborer could enjoy the beauty of life and not live
as a mere slave or as a machine. Perhaps Edith Simcox had
in mind that section of the above-mentioned chapter in
which Ruskin despaired that the labor conditions which he
knew served merely to degrade the worker.
. . . we manufacture everything there (in the large
industrial centers) except men; we blanch cotton
and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape
pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine,
or to form a single living spirit, never enters into
our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to
whieh that cry is urging our myriads can be met only
in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to
teach them is but to show them their misery, and to
149
preach to them, if we do nothing more than preach, is
to mock at it. It can he met only hy a right under
standing, on the part of all classes, of what kinds
of lahor are good for men, raising them, and making
them happy; hy a determined sacrifice of such conven
ience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to he got only
hy the degradation of the workman; and hy equally de
termined demand for the products and results of
healthy and ennobling lahor.'
In Morris, Simcox found a hopeful note, for she found
that Morris believed that working conditions had been im
proved since Ruskin wrote in 1853 and would continue to
improve if the workers themselves would demand the change
of conditions. Morris, too, was concerned that ”the pres
ent course of civilization will destroy the heauty of
life,” as Miss Simcox said, hut he did not appeal to art
ists or to connoisseurs for higher aims or more enlight
ened patronage. ”He appeals chiefly to the masses of peo
ple, urging them to do the thing which they must naturally
most desire to do, namely take pleasure in their daily
work. "
Simcox went on with this ideal of finding pleasure in
daily work as she quoted from Morris’s second lecture,
’ ’The Art of the People.” ’ ’That thing which I understand
by real art is the expression hy man of his pleasure in
lahor.” She continued:
Por Morris there was no such thing as one art for the
rich and another for the poor. Morris called useless
work and had work and waste the creation of products
• ]
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (Boston, n. d.),
II, 166.
150
to whieh people have to he persuaded. People now
feel that all work is disagreeable, a necessary evil,
to he endured, as an enlightened manufacturer tells
his workers, "Hope hy working to earn leisure." For
Morris work must be pleasure. Doing his daily work
is obviously the thing which gives Morris the great
est pleasure, and he would die if he did not have
that pleasure of working.
Pleasureful work, she said, would produce less waste
and friction than one would find in 1882, and she admired
Morris’s desires that workers have the right to find ease
and leisure in and with their work. She believed, with
Morris, that the public had the right to buy good works
from the very creators of the products, a point that Mor
ris further developed in Hews from Nowhere.
Miss Simcox seemed almost to be taking up Morris’s
cause as she restated some of his arguments in these lec
tures that were delivered between 1878 and 1881. Of Mor
ris's ideal of a decentralized government she said that
all classes must have a share in governing themselves and
all those governing must have reached a high level of in
telligence and of morality. She quoted Morris as saying,
"Ancient civilization was chained to slavery and it fell,"
and then she went on to say that modern civilization would
fall likewise, instead of growing into fresh artistic
life, unless it could deal with what she called the
"residuum." "And to what quarter can we look hopefully ®
for help in this task except to that which Mr. Morris has
jappealed already? Let the manufacturer and the mechanic
151
moralize each other . . . hut it is the mechanic alone
that can moralize his laborer.”
She returned to the matter of pleasureful work at the
end of her critique of his lectures when she spoke of Mor
ris’s desire to regenerate the decorative arts: "That
cause is the democracy of art, the ennobling of daily and
common work, which will one day put hope and pleasure in
the place of fear and pain as the force which keeps labor
and men a-going.”
While in this lecture Morris discussed hopes for the
ideal society of the future, Simcox dwelt chiefly on man’s
having pleasureful work to do and the necessity for social
equality among workers.
Morris’s Hopes and Fears for Art was published in
London by Ellis and White in 1882 and was published in
Boston the same year by Roberts Brothers. An anonymous
review of this book was published in the Century Magazine
(XXIV, 464-465) in July of 1882. In contrast to Edith
Simcox this reviewer found Morris’s five lectures full of
despair. He argued that Morris said that he did not de
spair about the present and of the future of art, "this is
his Credo," but the reviewer felt that this attitude was
not borne out in the tone of the lectures:
A low-spiritedness, not to say a hopelessness, per
vades all his remarks, and the very fervor with which
he chants his creed at the outset makes one guess
the hollowness of his belief. Against it set this
statement in "The Beauty of Life": "The danger . . .
152
(that) the present course of civilization will destroy
the beauty of life. . . .H
The most fruitful of the lectures, this reviewer
found, was the one called "Making the Best of It," whose
very title sounded discouraging to him, and "the discour
agement exhales from every part of the book." He found
that Morris seemed to be struggling against insuperable
odds toward the improving of labor conditions and the
state of art, and he said that Morris gave "the impression
|that he could not be happy unless he were kicking someone
I
(
or being by some one kicked."
This reviewer also found Ruskin lurking in Morris’s
intellectual background, and he added, without making
specific references, the influence of Rossetti. He con
cluded that "Rossetti and Ruskin appear to have had more
!
power in swaying Mr. Morris's ideas of art than is health
ful; they have encouraged him in the national malady of
misgovernment."
He could not understand why they had "all these
whimperings from Mr. Morris, whom . . . the publics have
encouraged, supported, and enriched."
A brief, unsigned review in The Athenaeum for Septem-
ber 16, 1882, also noted Morris's debt to Ruskin in the
five lectures called Hopes and Rears for Art. It was with
Morris's concern that the workingman have opportunities
!
2II, 374-375 (#2864).
1 53
for pleasureful work in pleasant surroundings that this
reviewer was chiefly troubled, but he did not agree with
Morris concerning the importance of the untrained hand-
craftsmen working on great architectural projects of the
past. Morris had said that without the hundreds of simple
workmen who lent their naive talents in the medieval
period none of the great monuments that had been built be
fore the Renaissance could have been completed.
This notion of the powers of the handicraftsman in
building Westminster, St. Sophia, etc., is put forward
so often in these pages, that it is incumbent on a
critic that he challenge its truth, and even, in a
practical way, its value. Briefly then let us say
there is no proof that such craftsmen as those Mr.
Morris addressed are, or ever were, or ever will be
capable of. the feat attributed to them.
Thus Morris's ideal of the common man's participation
in the creative artistry that built Gothic buildings was
questioned here. The reviewer did not believe that either
of Morris's two ideals (for pleasureful work or for crea
tive artistry) was important in the creation of great
art. He questioned whether a mere carver knew anything
about the history of art or about history or art itself.
If everyone were to become an artist on a small scale,
would the level of art rise in any society? The reviewer
doubted this.
Morris wanted to restore the lesser arts by urging
all the people to become creatively artistic in any way.
He thought a busy, creative, artistic people would be a
154
happy people whose morals would "be raised by their concern
for art. The reviewer did not believe that they would be.
He found no value in Morris’s desire to have all children
learn to draw in the hope that this would eventually raise
mankind to a higher level.
The Edinburgh Review gave no notice to Morris's lec-
• 3
tures until January of 1897, three months after Morris1s-
death, when an unsigned review appeared on three works,
Hopes and gears for Art (1882), Gothic Architecture: a
Lecture for the Arts and Grafts Exhibition (1893), and the
new edition of The Poetical Works of William Morris (1896),
Of the lecture on architecture the reviewer said it
". . . is a brilliant and interesting recapitulation of
the history of architecture from his own standpoint . . .
but his view is a narrow one." Again Morris had suggested
the importance of training simple workmen to contribute
their little talents so that a great art of the people
could arise in the great medieval buildings. The reviewer
disagreed with Morris's theory of architecture as a living
art: "His theory was that architecture could only be said
to exist as a living art when it was the work of a co
operative guild of artificers, and Gothic architecture
alone was supposed to fulfil this condition." Morris's
ideal of the small craftsman's participating in creative
5CLXXXV, 63-83.
155
artistry was here seriously challenged, for the reviewer
seemed to hold a higher value for the name "artist” than
Morris did. Morris considered anyone who created anything
beautiful with his hands to be an artist.
Although it was not clear that the reviewer had read
all of Morris's lectures with which his article was con
cerned, he did read enough to become emotionally wrought
up over Morris's attitude concerning the existence and
value of the arts in late Victorian England.
To read it fHopes and Fears for Artl one would suppose
that modern life was a howling wilderness, without a
joy to be found in it; a state of feeling from which
a little of the sense of humor at least would have
preserved the lecturer.
The reviewer disagreed entirely with Morris's repeat
ing that there was no bane to art like wealth and luxury:
He might have expected that we should remember the
existence of Egypt and temples reared with forced
labour; of the Taj Mahal, of the Alhambra, of wicked
popes and princes of the Renaissance for whom the
greatest artists were glad to work. It is useless to
tell us in the teeth of these and other stubborn facts
that art is only connected with simplicity, with moral
ity, with honesty, poverty, and thrift. Wealth and
luxury are no blight on art, as Morris sought to per
suade his hearers. . . . There is hardly a beautiful
thing at South Kensington but has been made because
some wealthy man wanted it— there has never been any
work of real art which did not interest the man who
made it; but it was not made for that sole end— it
was made to sell.
No periodical reviewer disagreed more pointedly with
Morris's conditions under which art was created. His very
choice of the abstractions "Simplicity," "morality,"
"honesty, poverty and thrift," come very close indeed to
1 56
Morris's ideal conditions, "but this reviewer believed that
art was created under conditions almost the opposite of
these ideals.
He also had something to say about the enjoyment of
work; Morris (and Ruskin) argued that unenjoyable work was
a curse and demoralized society.
. . . as to joying in it [work] the fact is that the
happiness of having work to do which is a source of
pleasure and interest for its own sake is, and must
be in this crowded life, the lot only of a fortunate
minority; to expect otherwise is Utopian, though^it
! is an ideal, no doubt to aim at.
i
The author concluded this highly perceptive review
with two statements: "A vain man he [Morris] certainly
was not, but a man more obstinately convinced in his own
opinions probably never lived."
An unsigned review in The Athenaeum for September 28,
1912,^ discussed briefly The Odyssey, one volume of Mor
ris's collected works, which were then appearing. It had
a note on Morris's attitude toward labor that evinced an
understanding of Morris better than did the previous re
viewer in The Edinburgh Review.
Morris would have scouted the suggestion that any
healthy human being could find useful work unpleas
ant. His whole teaching is implied in his words,
"The reward of labour is life."
This is very close to the heart of Morris's hope for
a better society, for he believed that work should be
4XX, 339-340.
J
157
pleasureful and satisfying to all men, and not the curse
that it had become under the profit system, with men la
boring merely to stay alive. He saw labor manipulated by
money-hungry men in his own day, men competing with others
for power, which they could attain if they could drain
everything from their slave-laborers.
Mr. T. D. A. Cockerell in an article entitled
5
’ 'William Morris and the World Today” underlined this
point:
I
. . . he (Morris) dreaded the cheapening of endeavor
by competition with devices intended to curtail the
expenditure of human energy. It was for this reason
that he wrote his News from Nowhere, to stand against
the picture presented by Bellamy's Looking Backward.
A society which allowed men to work pleasurefully
was for Morris an honest society. A society which oper
ated otherwise dishonestly exploited all who worked and
caused nothing but unhappiness, poverty, and misery.
More than anything else the lectures struck at the evils
in society; the prose romances were to point the way for
the good life.
On March 26, 1874, Morris wrote a letter to Mrs.
g
Alfred Baldwin in which he said, in part:
. . . but look, suppose people lived in little commu
nities among gardens and green fields, so that you
5Bial, LIX (1915), 545-548.
^Philip Henderson (ed.), The letters of William Mor
ris to his Family and Friends (London, 1950), p. 62.
158
could be in the country in five minutes’ walk, and
had few wants, almost no furniture, for instance,
and no servants, and studied the (difficult) arts of
enjoying life, and finding out what they really
wanted: then I think one might hope civilization
had really begun.
Clearly Morris had begun thinking about a better
state for man as a civilized creature as early as in his
fortieth year, though he was not to join a socialist or
ganization and begin lecturing for another nine years.
After quoting this letter, Mr. A. Clutton-Brock said of
Morris’s thinking in 1874:
He had already a clear notion of the way of life
which seemed to him best for the whole society; and
in this he was unlike many revolutionaries whose aim
is to change the machinery of society without ever
having asked themselves what they want to do with it
when they have changed it. But the machinery itself
puzzled Morris so that he was not anxious to start
meddling with it.7
The ’ ’diffuse and unintelleetual Morris,” as Douglas
Bush called him in the ninth chapter of Mythology and the
8
Romantic Tradition in English Poetry, avoided meddling
with the machinery of society all of his life, as we shall
see. He saw what society was in his day, and a penetra
ting view he had; he eventually worked out what he thought
society should be, but he never made clear the transi
tional stages that must take place Before the ideal could
be realized.
7
William Morris, His Work and His Influence (New
York, 1913), pp. 98-99.
8(New York, 1963), p. 297.
159
Why Morris became a Socialist is not important here,
but what he did for that cause is important to this study
as Morris related the principles of Socialism, as he un
derstood. them, to the causes of art, labor, and society.
The characteristics of his ideal society were so closely
related to the cause of Socialism, as Morris defined
l
“Socialism," that if all the characteristics could have
been discovered in a group of people Morris would have
called them ideal Socialists.
Holbrook Jackson, in his Dreamer of Dreams: The Rise
and Fall of 19th Century Idealism, wrote this about the
relation of art to Socialism in Morris’s life:
. . . since Morris became a Socialist attempts have
been made to separate his art from his politics. The
attempt fails because there is never a time when Mor
ris does not associate art with the problem of liv
ing. . . . his conversion to Socialism is the inev
itable consummation of his attitude toward the arts.
He is seeking all the time to objectivize an emotion
al state, largely subconscious, which makes some con-
! eeption of a perfect state inevitable if he is to
find peace.9
Morris admitted on many occasions that he did not
understand political theory, and, that, while he was will
ing to call himself a Marxist, he did not know what Marx’s
theory of value was. When Morris first became interested
in doing something about labor conditions in England and
joined the Democratic Federation in 1883, he was not un
aware that his proposals for changes for the working
9(london, 1948), pp. 137-138.
160
people of England were rather similar to the hopes that
many of the Socialists had for the laborers. Morris went
to work for Socialism as a lecturer, and stayed with the
party for seven years, most of them the unhappiest of his
life. His hopes for a Socialist victory were tied with
his desire for three of his ideals: equality, pleasureful
work for everyone, and happiness among the working people.
During one of Morris's visits to Glasgow as a lec
turer his host was a young Scottish Socialist named Bruce
Glasier. The two men saw each other several times, and
these meetings formed the basis for a book which.Mr.
Glasier wrote about Morris and his desire to improve work
ing conditions. Several passages from Mr. Glasier*s book
will be quoted below as examples of Morris's work for his
ideals, of his thinking, and of his direct ties with the
Socialist movement between 1883 and 1890.
The first two quotations that follow indicate how
little Morris was yoked intellectually to Socialism but
show the sincerity with which he hoped for a change so
that his ideals for working people could be realized. As
Morris was leaving one Socialist meeting the chairman at
tempted to ascertain what Morris knew about Marx's
theories:
On his rising to go, Nairne, as a sort of parting
shot, put to him the question: 'Does Comrade Morris
accept Marx's theory of value?' Morris* reply was
emphatic, and has passed into the movement as one of
the best remembered of his sayings: 'I am asked if
161
I believe in Marx* theory of value. To speak quite
frankly, I do not know what Marx's theory of value
is, and I’m damned if I want to know.’ Then he
added: ’Truth to say, my friends, I have tried to
understand Marx’s theory, but political economy is
not in my line, and mueh of it appears to me to be
dreary rubbish. But I am, I hope, a Socialist none
the less. It is enough political economy for me to
know that the idle class is rich and the working
class is poor, and that the rich are rich because
they rob the poor. That I know because I see it with
my eyes. I need read no books to convince me of it.
And it does not matter a rap, it seems to me, whether
the robbery is accomplished by what is termed surplus
value, or by means of serfage or open brigandage.
The whole system is monstrous and intolerable, and
what we Socialists have got to do is to work together
for its complete overthrow, and for the establishment
in its stead of a system of co-operation where there
shall be no masters or slaves, but where everyone w
will live and work jollily together as neighbours and
comrades for the equal good of all. That, in a nut
shell,^ is my political economy and my social democ
racy. ’
In this second quotation Morris proved himself a con
servative "revolutionary Socialist," for he recognized the
need for laws so long as they were not oppressive and the
people, under them, could "live and work harmoniously
together.”
’I call myself a revolutionary Socialist,’ said
Morris, ’because I aim at a complete revolution in
social conditions. I do not aim at reforming the
present system, but at abolishing it; and I aim,
therefore, not at reforms, either on their own ac
count, or as a means of bringing about Socialism as
the eventual outcome of a series of palliations and
modifications of Capitalistic society:— I aim at
bringing about Socialism itself right away, or,
rather, as soon as we can get the people to desire
it and will to have it. But, mark you again, what I
aim at is Socialism or Communism, not Anarchism.
1 0
J. Bruce Glasier, William Morris and the Early Bays
iof the Socialist Movement (London, 1921), p. 32.
162
Anarchism and Communism, notwithstanding our friend
Kropotkin, are incompatible in principle. Anarchism
means, as I understand it, the doing away with, and
doing without, laws and rules of all kinds, and in
each person being allowed to do just as he pleases.
I don't want people to do just as they please; I want
them to consider and act for the good of their fellows
— for the commonweal in fact. Now what constitutes
the commonweal, or common notion of what is for the
common good, will and always must be expressed in the
form of laws of some kind— either political laws, in
stituted by the citizens in public assembly, as of
old by folk-moot, or if you will by real councils or
parliaments of the people, or by social customs grow
ing up from the experience of Society. The fact that
at present many or the majority of laws and customs
are bad, does not mean that we can do without good
laws or good customs. When I think of my own work
and duties as a citizen, a neighbour or friend, a
workman or an artist, I simply cannot think of myself
as behaving or doing right if I shut out from my mind
the knowledge I possess of social customs or decrees
concerning what is right-doing or wrong-doing. I am
not going to quibble over the question as to the dif
ference between laws and customs. I don't want ei
ther laws or customs to be too rigid, and certainly
not oppressive at all. Whenever they so become, then
I become a rebel against them, as I am against many
of the laws and customs to-day. But I don't think a
Socialist community will require many governmental
laws; though each citizen will require to conform as
far as possible to the general understanding of how
we are to live and work harmoniously together.
(Glasier, pp. 63-65)
In spite of Morris's insistence that his relationship
with Marxism was not based--on a knowledge of Marx's eco
nomic theories, he had read Marx in French before Das
Kapital had been translated into English, and he had read
the works mentioned by the Socialists in the next quota
tion as well as many that they had not read. These works
aided him in his search for Socialism, which he said had
been in the process of creation since human history began.
163
'But now,' lie said, 'you asked me this morning why
I became a Socialist; suppose I in turn ask some of
you chaps to tell me what brought you to Socialism?
I confess I cannot help wondering, when I find myself
in a group of comrades, why they particularly have
heard the word gladly while the mass of their fellows
have turned from it with deaf ears.'
Rather shyly one or two of us recounted, as best
we could, the circumstances that had led us to leave
the accustomed paths of politics. Our replies seemed
almost as though we were each reciting the same story
by rote. We had ahl, it appeared, from our boyhood
days felt, without knowing why, the injustice of the
existing system of leisure and riches on the one hand,
and hard toil and poverty on the other. Our reading—
and in most instances Burns and Shelley, Carlyle and
Ruskin were among the authors mentioned— had further
aroused our minds on the subject. Then had come the
Highland Crofters' revolt, and Henry George's 'Prog
ress and Poverty' and 'land for the People' agitation,
lord Beaconsfield1s 'Sybil,' Kingsley's 'Alton locke,'
Mrs lynn linton's 'Joshua Davidson,' and Victor Hugo's
'les Miserables' were also mentioned among the books
that had proved stepping-stones out of the old ways
of thought.
Morris expressed surprise that none of us appeared
to have read More's 'Utopia' or any writings of the
more definite pre-Marxian Socialist thinkers— Robert
Owen, St. Simon, Fourier, louis Blanc, and the like.
'As for Marx,' he said, 'his writings were, of course,
hardly known in this country outside the foreign rev
olutionary groups in london until Hyndman drew atten
tion to them. Besides, until a couple of years or so
ago, even his "Capital" was published only in German
and French, and is of such an analytical character
that it had practically no influence in creating
Socialist thought in this country. (Glasier, pp. 67-68)
'The truth is,' Morris added, 'that there has
always been a making of Socialists, and a making of
Society towards Socialism, going on since human his
tory began. I have recently been looking a good deal
into the literature of the Middle Ages and earlier
periods of European history, and have been struck
with the definiteness of Socialist feeling, and even
Socialist customs, among the people and monkish sects
of those days. I am writing some chapters for Common
weal on the Revolt of Ghent, and on John Ball and the
Peasants' Revolt in England in Richard II*s day, in
j which I hope to make this better understood in the
movement.' (Glasier, pp. 68-69)__________________________
164
When Morris was asked a practical question such as
the one that follows he usually answered calmly and rea
sonably and then resolved his answer toward one of his
ideals, pleasureful work, in this case.
'Does the lecturer propose to do away with coal-min
ing, and, if so, what would we do for fuel?'
'Our friend's question is quite a proper one,'
replied Morris. . . . 'For myself, I should be glad
if we could do without coal, and indeed without bur
rowing like worms and moles in the earth altogether;
and I am not sure but we could do without it if we
wished to live pleasant lives, and did not want to
produce all manner of mere mechanism chiefly for mul
tiplying our own servitude and misery, and spoiling
half the beauty and art of the world to make mer
chants and manufacturers rich. In olden days the peo
ple did without coal, and were, I believe, rather
more happy than we are today, and produced better art,
poetry, and quite as good religion and philosophy as
we do nowadays. But without saying we can do without
coal, I will say that we could do with less than half
of what we use now, if we lived properly and produced
only really useful, good, and beautiful things. We
could get plenty of timber for our domestic fires if
we cultivated and eared for our forests as we might
do; and with the water and wind power we now allow
to go to waste, so to say, and with or without elec
tricity, we could perhaps obtain the bulk of the
motive power which might be required for the essential
mechanical industries. And, anyway, we should, I hope,
be able to make the conditions of mining much more
healthy and less disagreeable than they are today, and
give the miners a much higher reward for their labour;
and also— and this I insist is most important— no one
ought to be compelled to work more than a few hours
at a time underground, and nobody ought to be com
pelled to work all their lives, or even constantly
week by week, at mining, or indeed any other disagree
able job. Everybody ought to have a variety of occu
pation, so as to give him a chance of developing his
various powers, and of making his work a pleasure
rather than a dreary burden. (Glasier, pp. 81-82)
To the charge that Glasier had often heard, that Mor
ris might find his ideal society as a recluse away from
165
all men, he wrote the following passages. The ideal of
communal living Morris described in A Dream of John Ball,
hut Glasier was responsible for recording Morris's state
ment that his Utopia must be pitched in the midst of peo
ple who wanted to work and who enjoyed creativity. Morris
knew that man was a man only when he lived as a social
;creature among others on whom he depended, just as society
[depended on him for a contribution toward the society's
I
good. These passages make clear the social ideals that
Morris hoped socialism would offer the working people:
opportunity for pleasureful work, social equality, and
happiness (working together at desired tasks and for pur
poses that all the workers could understand).
He acknowledged that under present-day conditions of
wealth and labour the pursuit of art and literature
was to men like himself a mere sort of truant boy's
pastime— a fiddling while Home was burning. 'For my
self,' he said, 'I often feel conscience-stricken
about it, and if I knew any corner of the world where
there was social equality I should pack up and go
there at once. But I am not attracted, as some good
men both in present and bygone times have been, with
the idea of going out into the wilderness, either as
an anchorite or as one of a group of Socialist Fifth
Monarchy men. I don't want to get out from among my
fellow men, for with all their faults— which are not
theirs only but our own— I like them and want to live
and work among them. My Utopia must be pitched
square in the midst of them or nowhere. (Glasier, p. 91)
He had no patience with the idea that men, apart from
the environment of society— its education, customs,
and co-operation— were naturally unselfish, amiable,
or God-like creatures; nor that 'free' from organized
society they could attain any human eminence or hap
piness. Neither the 'freedom' of Rousseau's 'Man in
a State of Nature,' or that of Thoreau's 'Solitude
in the Woods,' appealed to him. He saw that all
166
things that pleased him in life— work, art, litera
ture, fellowship, civic courage and social custom—
were the outcome of men associating with, not of men
separating themselves from, their fellows, either in
work or woe.
In fine, he was a Socialist, not an Anarchist.
He believed that man was a social being whose welfare
depended on the welfare of Society and on his sharing
in its common rights and freedom, not on his striving
to assert his own separate powers or inclinations.
(Glasier, p. 123)
More than he stressed any of Morris's ideals, Glasier
stressed the importance of Morris's helping people to have
the opportunity of pleasureful work. Indeed, it was Gla
sier who said that he had it from Morris himself that Hews
from Howhere was written to indicate how social equality
and happiness could be found in a social state almost dia
metrically opposed to Edward Bellamy's mechanically effi
cient future Boston, where men enjoyed idleness.
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. 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 beau
ty of life nowadays.' But he did not in the least re
joice 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. Bor 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 jus
tice 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
167
and reward, but to get rid as far as possible of any
occasion for work and exertion altogether, and there
by to reduce life so far as possible to a passive
experience of sensory and intellectual excitement.
It was in protest against Bellamy's 'Looking Back
ward’ with its notion of making civilisation a mere
emporium of artificial contrivances, and life a cram
of sensuous experience, 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 para
dise as he imagines! (Glasier, pp. 149-150)
The following statement from near the end of Mr. Gla
sier ’s book underlined the ideals of social equality,
freedom of each individual (so long as he practiced the
Golden Rule), and happiness. Morris believed that men
should have these so long as they were willing to work
interdependently for the common good. Glasier made quite
clear what Morris meant in the lectures and romances
named, by "ideal conditions of fellowship and work."
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 op
pression 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 ’Usefull Work versus________
168
Useless Toil,' and 'How we live, and how we might
live,' and in his 'John Ball' and 'Hews from
Nowhere.' (Glasier, p. 144)
William Morris's first biographer, J. W. Mackail, and
Morris's daughter, May Morris, however much they wrote
about Morris and however sincerely, seemed never to under
stand or purposely omitted mentioning Morris's participa
tion as a revolutionary for the socialist cause. However,
such writers as Arthur Clutton-Brock in 1913 and E. P.
Thompson in 1955 wrote ingenuously about Morris's militant
work for the cause, whieh apparently was some embarrass
ment to both his friend Mackail and May Morris. Clutton-
Brock said this:
He [Morris] saw society as a class war already exist
ing, but only conscious on the part of the rich and
concealed by them under the unrealities of the party
conflict. His aim was to make the poor conscious of
this war, to show them what evils they had to fight
against, and to convince them that by fighting they
could end them. He never had any concealment of this
aim, and we cannot doubt that, if the revolution
which he hoped for had come in his time, he would
have been a revolutionary leader; or that if it failed
he would have been put to death by the victors. He
might also, if it had degenerated into a terror, have
been put to death by the victors of his own side. But
even then, we may be sure, he would have died with
courage and without despair.
It was on the 17th of January, 1883, that he de
clared himself a Socialist by becoming a member of
the Democratic Federation; and in doing so he enlisted
as a private who was ready to obey orders. "I put
some conscience," he said, "into trying to learn the
economical side of Socialism, and even tackled Marx,
though I suffered agonies of confusion of the brain
over reading the economics of that work.''
11
William Morris: His Work and His Influence (New
York), pp. 150-151.
169
In this quotation Mr. Glutton-Brock copied directly from
Mackail's Life of William Morris,(11,80), and did not
check the actual source (Collected Works, XXIII, 278), the
lecture entitled "How I Became a Socialist" (1894), where
Morris actually said:
Well, having joined a Socialist body (for the Federa
tion soon became definitely Socialist), I put some
conscience into trying to learn the economical side
of Socialism, and even tackled Marx, though I must
confess that, whereas I thoroughly enjoyed the histor
ical part of "Capital," I suffered agonies of confu-
sion of the brain overreading the pure economics of
that great work." (Italies mine)
Hote here that Mackail (and Clutton-Brock after him) omit
ted the italicized parts of Morris's quotation which
stressed his pro-Socialist leanings, and he did not in
clude any ellipses marks to indicate that he had omitted
anything from what Morris actually said.
Mr. Philip Henderson in his excellent pamphlet,
William Morris, published for The British Council, quoted
from an unpublished letter which Mackail wrote to a Mrs.
Coronio on May 12, 1899, concerning the necessity for tact
in dealing with the William Morris-Jane Morris-D. G. Ros
setti triangle. Mackail was the son-in-law of Edward
Burne-Jones, Morris's lifelong best friend, but who re
mained aloof from any Socialist connections. Apparently
we must assume that Mackail was using tact here, in def
erence to Morris's family and close friends, in not re
vealing frankly how deeply Morris was actually involved
170
with Socialism. Here is what Mr. Mackail said to Mrs.
Coronio:
Of course my difficulties over the work itself
(the Life! were great, especially in the constant
need for what is called "tact", which is a quality
unpleasantly near untruthfulness often; and espe
cially I feel that my account . . . must he exces
sively flat owing to the amount of tact that had to
he exercised right and left.12
Far from any embarrassment which those close to him
might have felt, Morris was still proudly proclaiming him
self a Socialist in 1894, four years after he had ceased
to he a party member and only two years before he died.
Organized Socialism gave Morris the promise that he might
see within his lifetime some of the ideals of his desired
society come into being. We need not pursue here the rea
sons for his leaving organized Socialism in 1890, but the
ideals that he had come to associate with the movement
were never forgotten, Morris's ideals and those of his
colleagues in Socialism were seldom the same, and we have
seen that he had begun to formulate his ideals by 1874,
nine years before he became a Socialist, but his ideals
could not materialize without a revolutionary change in
man's thinking and in society in general. Thus he went
along with the many hardships that attended his member
ship, seldom complaining, because without the organization
his ideals would have meant something only to him and to
12London, 1952, p. 22.
171
his workmen, laborers and fellow artists. In his own
shops he was practicing most of the ideals that were char
acteristic of his ideal human society; the richness that
these ideals gave to the lives of him and his workmen he
felt should be experienced by everyone.
Sir-Ramsay Macdonald once said that the roots of Mor-
1 3
ris's Socialism lay in craftsmanship. ^ He was wrong only
in the narrowness of his view of what Morris was attempt
ing to accomplish for artists and for workmen.
Mr. Clutton-Brock may not have pursued his sources
far enough to quote Morris accurately in regard to his
Socialist attitudes, but his sights were raised to the
heights that Sir Ramsay's perhaps could not have been, for
Mr. Clutton-Brock1s main purpose in his book on Morris was
to make clear that no one except Morris "has ever written
more clearly upon art or upon its relation to the struc
ture of society" (p. 218).
Basing his remarks chiefly on Morris's lectures on
art Clutton-Brock said:
1 3
A. P. Tsehiffely, Bon Roberto: Being the Account
of the Life and Works of R. B. Cunninghame-Graham
(London, 1937), p. 440. "Shortly afterhis death was an
nounced in England, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald wrote about him
[Cunninghame-Graham]: 'I find it difficult to express my
feelings for such a great man. His Socialism was curious
ly like that of William Morris's, although the roots of
Morris's Socialism were in craftsmanship. Graham's So
cialism was based on romantic ideas of freedom and his
profound feeling for the bottom dog.'"
172
In nearly all of his lectures Morris insists upon
this relation between art and the structure of soci
ety; and art for him does not mean merely painting
and sculpture, but all those works of man in which
the workman does better than he is forced to do by
his material needs. Art is man's expression of his
joy in labour, he said; and he believed this joy in
labour to be the thing best worth having in life.
Born into an age of destructive scepticism and him
self without belief in any religious dogma, he found
in art, in this everlasting effort of man to do bet
ter than he need, the most exhilarating mystery of
life. The humblest work of art was to him a sign of
divinity, a promise of something that he hardly
dared believe; and he was moved by it as other men
are moved by noble, unexpected actions. For art to
him always remained a surprising product of the trou
bled and laborious life of man, a song of prisoners,
as it were, which touched him the more if it was rude
and simple, (p. 219)
One more quotation from this same book pointed Mor
ris's transcendent concern for art in the lives of all
people to one of the ideals most important to Morris all
of his life and without which no ideal human society could
exist, happiness:
He loved all works of true art not only for the de
light they gave him, but also because they seemed to
him symptoms of happiness; and he judged of the happi
ness of a society by the nature of its art, particu
larly of the humbler, less conscious, art which beau
tifies things of ordinary use. (p. 220)
For Morris art was not simply the cause of happiness
to those who created it; art had an important moral func
tion in society. Art did not show simply that men were
happy in their work but gave evidence to him that practi
tioners of art were also practitioners of good. Morris
did not argue the logic of this point, but seemed to feel
intuitively that artists could do no evil. He must have
173
known the historical examples of such artists as Benvenuto
Cellini and Andrea del Sarto, hut he persisted in his
belief.
Morris insisted that art did not happen any more than
the British Constitution happened, for to him art
meant, not the work of a few men of genius but all
work in which men express the pleasure of work. He
himself could turn working-men, chosen at a venture,
into artists; and therefore he believed that society
could do the same.
So far from having a romantic indifference to the
law of cause and effect, he saw a connection of cause
and effect that no one had seen before him. So far
from caring nothing for morality, he preached a new
doctrine of morals where the world before him had
seen nothing but chance beauty or ugliness. He him
self, clear of purpose and strong of will, laboured
to make the purpose of society more clear, and its
will more powerful. He was a visionary, but not a
sentimentalist; an artist who was not hostile to
science, for he did not believe that real science
could be hostile or indifferent to art. (Clutton-
Brock, p. 248)
Here is Mr. Glutton-Brock1s perceptive summation on
the importance of beauty to Morris:
. . . for Morris beauty was another term to distin
guish good from evil. He did not restrict morality
but extended it. He was aware of good where others
saw only beauty and of evil where others saw ugli
ness. (p. 247)
The most recent full-scale study of Morris and per
haps the most scholarly book ever devoted to him is enti-
tled William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary (London,
1955), by E. P. Thompson. Mr. Thompson found more intel
lectual qualities in Morris than did any other critic and
traced his intellectual background to Carlyle, Ruskin, and
Marx. This was not a startling discovery, but the full
174
ness with which Mr. Thompson treated Morris's intellectual
background is indeed worthy of note.
Thompson called Carlyle's Past and Present "a blis
tering attack on the morality of industrial capitalism,
contrasted with the idealized picture of life in the mon
astery of St. Edmundsbury in the twelfth century" (p. 59)*
Morris in many of his lectures attacked the morality of
industrial capitalism and created in his prose romances
idealized pictures of what life might be.
After quoting several passages from chapters eight
through twelve, Book III, of Past and Present, Thompson
summarized:
It is in Carlyle's disgust at the reduction by capi
talism of all human values to cash values that his
greatness lies: it is this which exercised most in
fluence over Morris, and— while it ran underground
for a while— found full and constant expression in
his later years, (p. 61)
Thompson seemed to think what Morris called an honest so
ciety was derived from Carlyle's thinking, especially in
the sense that an honest society did not trade man's labor
for a monetary standard. One of the ideals which Morris
desired was the use of the products of labor as the basis
for exchange (instead of any monetary system).
While nearly everyone who wrote of Morris showed
again his debt to Ruskin, Thompson narrowed the influence
to one paragraph, which he thought had more effect on Mor
ris than anything else in Ruskin. Here is the full para-
!
______ I
175
graph, part of which was quoted by Edith Simcox in her
review of Morris's lectures:
XVI. We have much studied and much perfected, of late,
the great civilized invention of the division of la
bor; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly
speaking, the labor that is divided; but the men:—
Divided into mere segments of men— broken into small
fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little
piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not
enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself
j in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail.
I Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make
many pins in a day; but if we could only see with
what crystal sand their points were polished,— sand
of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be
discerned for what it is,— we should think there
might be some loss in it also. And the great cry
that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder
than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for
this,— that we manufacture everything there except
men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and re
fine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to
strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living
spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages.
And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myn-
iads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor
preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their
misery, and to preach to them, if we do nothing more
than preach, is to mock at it. It can be met only by
a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of
what kinds of labor are good for men, raising them,
and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of
such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be
got only by the degradation of the workman; and by
equally determined demand for the products and results
of healthy and ennobling labor. (Stones of Venice, II,
165- 166)
Thompson related Ruskin's thought to Carlyle's but
noted this difference,
Like Carlyle, Ruskin believed that man achieved his
own humanity: but with Ruskin there was this dif
ference— the labour must be creative labour, summon
ing up the intellectual and moral— and not only phys
ical and mechanical— powers of the labourer, (p. 65)
When one hears so frequently in Morris's lectures the
176
importance of man’s participation in creative artistry, he
recognizes this as one of the ideals which Morris hoped to
bring about.
Importantly, Thompson did not stop here, where so
many of Morris's critics were content to halt, with Rus
kin, to find the last important influence on Morris's so
cial thought, despite Morris's frequent acknowledgment of
his debt to Karl Marx.
. . . neither Marx nor Engels had the time— nor, per
haps, the special abilities— to work out the full im
plications of their thought in relation to the social
function of the arts and to social morality. When
Morris read Capital he was able to take all that was
positive in Ruskin's thought, and give it a new co
herence and revolutionary direction. This is one of
Morris's greatest contributions to modern thought:
and, had he not read Ruskin in his Oxford years, it
would not have been possible. There is no wonder,
then, that he often acknowledges his debt. (p.68-69)
On the positive side, too, Ruskin added much to
Carlyle's early precepts. Since his conclusions were
derived less from any study of the facts of society
than from moral principles, he failed to construct
any valid system of knowledge. On the other hand, he
reiterated several truths which the orthodox Prophets
ignored, and which must have had a seminal influence
on Morris. True value, he declared, could not be ex
pressed by the capitalist laws of supply and demand:
"to be 'valuable' . . . is to 'avail towards life'.
A truly valuable . . . thing is that which leads to
life with its whole strength." "The real science of
political economy . . . is that which teaches nations
to desire and labour for the things that lead to
life: and which teaches them to scorn and destroy
the things that lead to destruction." His definition
of "labour," again, must have puzzled the orthodox:
"Labour is the contest of the life of man with an op
posite— the term "life" including his intellect, soul,
and physical power, contending with question, diffi
culty, trial, or material force." "The prosperity of
any nation," he continued, "is in exact proportion to
the quantity of labour which it jspends in obtaining__
177
and employing means of life. Observe— I say obtaining
and employing; that is to say, not merely wise produc
ing, but wisely distributing and consuming. . . .
Wise consumption is a far more difficult art than wise
production. . . . The vital question, for the individ
ual and for the nation, is, never 'how much do they
make?' but 'to what purpose do they spend?'" (p. 600)
William Morris was capable, as we see here, of assum
ing and developing an intellectual position, for which
position Mr. Thompson had great respect. Assuredly, Mr.
Thompson was attempting to discern and to uncover Marxian
influences and qualities in Morris's works, and he paid
Morris the great favor of rendering his evaluation only
after he had read his works very thoroughly. More will be
said on this matter in the summary of opinions of Morris
by the critics at the end of this chapter.
Mr. Thompson reprinted a quotation from the review in
Today, for November, 1888, which printed one of the few re
views of Morris's Signs of Change (1888), a group of seven
lectures, mostly on social and labor problems, one of them
on art:
On the historical and . . . critical essays in it
. . . we would venture humbly to protest that things
artistic are hardly in quite so parlous a state as'
Mr. Morris appears to think. . . . The fact is that
when our Socialist artists and critics set about wail
ing over the 'Decline of Art' they use the term in
much too restricted a sense. . . . The age which has
produced Dickens, and George Eliot, Balzac, Thackeray,
Zola and George Meredith, has little to fear from
comparison with any of its predecessors. Of course
the fact that we have good music and good landscapes,
good novels and good portraits is no reason that we
should have hideous public buildings and drawing room
decorations which set the teeth on edge; but it is a
reason why we should not be perpetually whining,
178
however tunefully, about the ’Decline of Art1. To
sum up, Socialists will do well to buy Mr. Morris’s
latest book for they will derive thereupon much
pleasure and some profit, but they had better keep
it to themselves and not lend it to their, as yet
unconverted acquaintances, (pp. 629-630)
The few reviews of Signs of Change betrayed rather
consistently the same attitude found in Today, which was
not different in tone from the reviews of the lectures in
the American periodicals of the period. Mr. Thompson, to
the contrary, did not see Morris merely take a stand and
thus stand for or against him, as did most of the others
who reviewed the publication of Morris's lectures; Thomp
son tried to see the lectures as objectively as possible
(and he had the undeniable advantage of writing sixty-
seven years after they were published). Rebutting the re
view in Today, Mr. Thompson said:
Signs of Change was one of his greatest achieve
ments, one of the great achievements of the nineteenth
century, the point of confluence of the protest of
Carlyle and Ruskin, and the historical genius of Marx,
backed by Morris's own lifetime of study and practice
in the arts and in society. It is a book— agree with
it or not— which pleases every honest reader in the
presence of great issues of morality and history:
written not by a lovable clown or childlike craftsman,
but by a profoundly serious, cultured, and responsible
man. (p. 630)
Lest one think that Morris's was a lone voice com
plaining about the plight of the workers, Mr. Thompson
reminded us that the great Liberal, Joseph Chamberlain,
was deeply concerned with social problems and with the
"natural rights” of man.
179
The Socialist League had only been formed a week
when Joseph Chamberlain delivered the first of his
famous "Hew Democracy" speeches at B i r m i n g h a m . ' 4
The sentiments were not extreme, but there was a new
emphasis on the "social question" in the national
field— an extension of the vigorous reforming policy
(which Chamberlain had already carried through in
his own city) to the affairs of the nation as a whole.
The very vagueness of some of his own language opened
perspectives which Morris was quick to understand:
"Every man," declared Chamberlain, "was born in
to the world with natural rights, with a right
to a share in the great inheritance of the com
munity, with the right to a part of the land of
his birth."
"I think that we shall have to give a good deal
more attention to what is called social legisla
tion," he declared next week (January 14th) at
Ipswich:
"I am certain that our Liberalism has no chance
at all unless it will recognize the rights of the
poor, their right to live, and their right to a
fair chance of enjoying life." (p. 424)
As his summary of Morris’s social position that can
be discovered in the lectures and as his estimate of Mor
ris's place in the stream of English social thought,
Thompson said:
First, it should be said that Morris, while capa
ble of severe intellectual discipline, was unfamiliar
with the development of European philosophy, and weak
in analytic logic. The bases of his theories are re
vealed in the process of historical and descriptive
exposition, rather than schematically in any single
book or lecture; and they must be reconstructed from
many scattered references. We have already seen
. . . how profoundly Morris was influenced as a young
man by John Ruskin’s "The Nature of G-othic," and how
he was later forced to develop Ruskin's theories to
justify his own actions in the early years of the
Anti-Scrape. . . . These theories were brought to
^January, 1885
180
their conclusion in 1883 or 1884, after his reading
of Capital and his active participation in the So
cialist movement, and— in the several dozen lectures
and articles written from that time to his death— he
altered them in no important principle, (p. 747)
Aymer Yallance published the first full-scale study
of Morris one year after his death. It was called William
Morris, His Art, His Writings, and His Public Life (Lon
don, 1897). Yallance made a careful study of Morris’s
lectures and arrived at this conclusion:
. . . Morris aims at escaping altogether from the com
plex conditions of modern life and seeks to find a
more primal and elementary state of simplicity. He
shows . . . a loving and personal regard for the very
earth itself . . . that sense of the motherhood of
the earth, which makes a man love the smell of the
fields after rain or the look of running water.
(pp. 347-348)
Yallance did not recognize the intellectual qualities
that a later critic like E. P. Thompson found in him but
believed that Morris wanted simply to move backward in
time to a period when the earth was young and had not been
fouled by man's slave factories. Vallance knew that Mor
ris had many times acknowledged his diseipleship to Ruskin
and included Morris's final acknowledgment of his debt:
On February 15, 1892, Morris wrote for the Kelms-
cott edition of Ruskin's "The Nature of Gothic" a
special preface. Herein he says that, to his mind,
this chapter of "The Stones of Venice" "is one of
the most important things written by the author, and
in future days will be considered as one of the very
few necessary and inevitable utterances of the cen
tury. . . . For the lesson that Ruskin here teaches
us is that art is the expression of man's pleasure
in labour; that it is possible for man to rejoice in
his work, for, strange as it may seem to us today,
there have been times when he did rejoice in it; and,
181
lastly, that unless man's work once again become a
pleasure to him, the token of which change will be
that beauty is once again a natural and necessary
accompaniment of productive labour, all but the worth
less must toil in pain, and therefore live in pain.
So that the result of thousands of years of man's ef
fort on earth must be general unhappiness and general
degradation. . . . If this be true, as I for one
most firmly believe, it follows that the hallowing
of labour by art is the one aim for us at the present
day. . . . But for this aim of at least gaining hap
piness through our daily and necessary labour, the
time is short enough, the need . . . urgent. . . .
And we may well admire and love the man who here
called the attention of English-speaking people to
this momentous subject, and that with such direct
ness and clearness and insight that his words could
not be disregarded." (pp. 238-239)
If Aymer Yallance did not believe that Morris really
wanted an ideal society of the future based upon Ruskin's
creed, neither did Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who was asked by
Arthur Compton-Rickett to write an account of his impres
sion of Morris for the latter's William Morris, a Study in
Personality (New York, 1913). Compton-Rickett quoted or
paraphrased Blunt without using quotation marks:
Morris's socialism had very little to do with the
received tenets of its political professors. It was
essentially aesthetic and in a sense reactionary.
Violent though it was against the evils of modern
capitalism, it was a lament for the past rather than
a program for the future. It had no modern construc
tive plan. "It will be time enough," he more than
once told me, "to think of that when we shall have
made a clean sweep of present conditions." His ideal
would have been a faithful reconstruction of the
past. (p. 62)
1 5
Paul Elmer More, writing at about this same time,
1 5
"William Morris," Shelburne Essays, Seventh Series
(New York and London, 1910), pp. 95-118.
182
doubted, as did Blunt and Compton-Rickett, that Morris's
dream of an ideal society was anything that could be taken
seriously, and he agreed with many of Morris's first crit
ics that socialism was for Morris nothing more than a
"Gospel of Discontent."
Socialism was for him the veritable Gospel of Discon
tent, of a piece with his general impatience at the
restraints of the order. "Civilization, I know now,"
he once exclaims [sic] "is doomed to destruction and
probably before very long: what a joy it is to think
of! and often it consoles me to think of barbarism
once more flooding the world, and real feelings and
passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of
our wretched hypocrisies." In his revolt against the
smug commonplace of Victorian art and in his efforts
to bring back something of the craftsman's joy in his
handiwork, Morris stood on firm ground and was a con
siderable force for good; but when he undertook to
formulate a new order of society, he talked of things
of which he had no understanding. He meant seriously
enough; he even "tackled Marx," as he says, suffering
thereby "agonies of confusion of the brain over read
ing the economics of that work." But his attempt in
such a book as Hews from Nowhere to portray a reju
venated society would be merely funny, if it were not
tiresome. Anything less practical it would be hard
to conceive than this fool's paradise in which all
the world is off on a perpetual May-day. Morris him
self seems to have been aware of the inanity of his
puppets when he let slip an allusion to "some for
gotten corner of the earth where people are unhappy,
and consequently interesting to a story teller."
(pp. 116-117)
Hews from Nowhere received far less critical atten
tion from the reviewers when it was published than one
might expect, recognizing its present popularity by the
frequency of its appearances today in anthologies of nine
teenth-century English literature. Indeed this is today
the most popular of Morris's prose works. As the next
183
critic of this well-known work, Mr. E. P. Thompson will
again be introduced. Thompson did not find Mews from
Mowhere to be a return to some medieval world, but took
Morris at his word, that this was a picture of the future,
where most of his dreams could be realized in the daily
lives of a happy people. One characteristic of the ideal
human society that Morris added in Mews from Mowhere to
those discoverable in the lectures was communal living,
and it was this topic that Thompson discussed.
Morris’s picture of the future found twofold ex
pression: first, in many scattered references and
passages in his lectures and articles; and second in
Mews from Mowhere. In both places he had no inten
tion whatsoever to make cut-and-dried prophecies,
but rather to make hints and suggestions. These sug
gestions are not always consistent with each other:
the choices before men in a Communist society (he
saw) were numerous, the manifestations of their so
cial life would take many forms. For example, he
made no pretence at consistency when speculating as
to the architecture of Communism. In News from
Mowhere he leaves the suggestion that the majority
ofthe people live in detached villas and cottages,
with here and there in the countryside a college of
learning and manufacture. In other writings he
dwelt more often on the idea of communal dwelling-
houses, "with good public cooking and washing rooms
. . . beautiful halls for the common meal . . . a
pleasant and ample garden, and a good play-groundV.
Again he proposed (especially for London) tall blocks
of flats "in what might be called vertical streets",
with ample privacy for each family, common laundries
and kitchens, and public rooms for social gatherings.
"Often when I have been sickened by the stupidity of
the mean idiotic rabbit warrens that rich men build
for themselves in Bayswater", he wrote,
"I console myself with visions of the noble
communal hall of the future, unsparing of ma
terials, generous in worthy ornament, alive
with the noblest thoughts of our time, and the
past, embodied in the best art which a free
184
and manly people could produce. . . ." (p. 796)
Several comments on lews from Mowhere from Mr. Thomp
son's hook suggested the importance of Socialistic liter
ature on Morris and implied, at least indirectly, that
some of the characteristics of Morris's ideal human soci
ety stemmed from this literature or from the Socialist
1 6
ideas which were rife among his Socialist friends. Com
ments on the following quotations from Thompson will be
reserved for the section of this chapter where I shall at
tempt to evaluate the contributions of Morris's critics.
In both lews from lowhere and the lectures, the empha
sis is upon the communal life, which Morris could
safely deduce from the common ownership of the means
of production and the consequent change in social
ethics: but the degree of emphasis, the forms for
its expression, are suggested in different terms.
This is important, because (as Morris never ceased to
repeat) true individualism was only possible in a
Communist society, which needed and valued the con
tribution of each individual to the common good; and,
in a society which fostered true variety, he knew
that different men would choose to live in different
ways.
Two general comments may be made upon his views.
First, Morris's whole approach, whether in lectures
or in the chapter "How the Change Came" in lews from
lowhere, is scientific. He never lost sight of the
economic and social foundation of the society of the
future. As he wrote to the Rev. George Bainton:
I
"It is the Socialist only who can claim a
measure which will realize a new basis of soci
ety; that measure is the abolition of private
I
" 1 6
See, for example, Anne Fremantle, This Little Band
of Prophets (lew York, 1959)» p. 65 and other places where
Morris was frequently mentioned in the book. The work
(mentioned most of the late nineteenth-century Socialists
jbut especially Sidney and Beatrice Webb and G. B. Shaw.
185
ownership in the means of production. The
land, factories, machinery, means of transit,
and whatever wealth of any sort is used for the
reproduction of wealth . . . must be owned by
the nation only, to be used by the workers . . .
according to their capacity7
On one point, above all, Morris expressed himself
with strong personal feeling. The division between
the intellectual and the worker, the man of "genius"
and the people, the manual and "brain" worker, would
be finally ended. Although he cannot have read it,
Morris reached in his intuitive way the most impor
tant statements of Marx in The Critique of the Gotha
Programme:
"In a higher phase of Communist society, after
the enslaving subordination of individuals under
division of labour, and therewith also the antith
esis between mental and physical labour, has van
ished, after labour has become not merely a means
-to live but has become itself the primary neces
sity of life, after the productive forces have
also increased with the all-round development of
the individual, and all the springs of co-opera
tive wealth flow more abundantly— only then can
the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully
left behind and society inscribe on its banners:
from each according to his ability, to each ac
cording to his needs." (pp. 800-801}
In sum, News from Nowhere seems to have grown spon
taneously rather than to have been constructed with
careful artifice. We are aware of William Morris,
writing fluently in his study in the intervals of
propaganda or designing, drawing on the experience of
both his public and his private life, making no at
tempt to disguise the intrusion of his own tempera
mental likes and dislikes into the narrative, (p. 803)
How free did Morris want people to be? was a question
that was occasionally put to him. How would he apply the
characteristic ideal of freedom to the marriage institu-
1 7
Thompson, p. 797. The letter which he quoted to
the Reverend George Bainton is included in Philip Hender
son's edition of the Letters, pp. 283-284.
186
tion, for instance? This was a question that was put to
him in a letter by Charles Faulkner. Because the reply
was important to an understanding of lews from Nowhere,
Mr. Thompson included it in his book. The letter, dated
16 October 1886, was not included in Mackail's Life or in
Henderson's edition of the Letters; it was discovered in
manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford and was quoted
by Thompson in its entirety.
"Clearly the present marriage system can only be
kept up by the same means as the wages system is,
i.e. the police & the army. When the wife can earn
her living as a citizen, and the children are citi
zens with inalienable rights of livelihood there
will be nothing to force people into legal prostitu
tion. . . . Husband, wife and children would all be
free.
"So far as this I think all Socialists go. I
should further say that the economical freedon of the
family would clear away the false sentiment with
which we have gilded the chain; but to my mind there
would still remain abundance of real sentiment which
man has evolved from the mere animal arrangement, and
that this would prevent indecencies; though as to the
outward form or symbol that it would take I can make
no prophecies.
"Here then is in brief my views:
"1st The couple would be free,
"2 Being free, if unfortunately distaste arose be
tween them they should make no pretence of its not
having arisen.
"3 But I should hope that in most cases friendship
would go along with desire, and would outlive it, and
the couple would still remain together, but always as
free people. In short artificial bolstering up of
natural human relations is what I object to, though ,
I admit that to make some ceremony or adornment of
them is natural & human also. (p. 819)
E. P. Thompson did not see Morris as "the idle singer
of an empty day"; indeed his long book underlining Mor
ris's revolutionary activities laid stress on Morris as a
187
realist, a hoper rather than a dreamer, but one who fought
most of his life, while he was working constantly as an
artist and writer, for the real social changes that he
knew were needed and whose outlines he sketched in the
prose romances. These were Mr. Thompson's final comments:
William Morris was the first creative artist of
major stature in the history of the world to take his
stand, consciously and without shadow of compromise,
with the revolutionary working class: to participate
in the day-to-day work of building the Socialist move
ment: to put his brain and his genius at its dispo
sal in the struggle. In the Socialist world of the
future, Morris’s writings and example will be remem
bered to England’s honour.
It is no small matter for a man of fifty, in the
face of the ridicule of society, the indifference of
family and friends, to set aside the work he loves
and fashion his life anew. But this was what Morris
did:
”To have breasted the Spanish pikes at Leyden,
to have drawn sword with Oliver: that may well
seem at times amidst the tangles of to-day a hap
py fate: for a man to be able to say, I have
lived like a fool, but now I will cast away fool
ing for an hour, and die like a man— there is
something in that certainly: and yet ’tis clear
that few men can be so lucky as to die for a
cause, without first of all having lived for it.
And as this is the most that can be asked from
the greatest man that follows a cause, so it is^o
the least that can be taken from the smallest."
His was not the impulsive whim of the dilettante ide
alist, but the steady enduring courage of the realist,
which upheld him in all the drudgery, committee wrang
ling and trivial duties of the movement, (pp. 841-842)
Sir Sydney Cockerell became, as a very young man, the
personal secretary to William Morris and was very close to
him during the last six years of Morris’s life. When
^®"The Beauty of Life," Collected Works, XXII, 176.
188
Oxford University Press republished Mackail's The Life of
William Morris in 1950, Sir Sydney was one of the few men
alive who had known Morris intimately, and he was asked to
write the Introduction. The last two paragraphs of his
Introduction discussed Morris’s Socialism in a vein close
to the attitude to be found in May Morris’s many intro
ductions and comments throughout the twenty-four volumes
of her father’s Collected Works. Cockerell’s calm, au
thoritative comments on this matter contrast interestingly
with the rather vehement statements by E. P. Thompson,
that were written five years later but from another point
of view. Whether we can believe the statements by his in
timate friends that Socialism was not so important to him
as his pro-Soeialist critics say it was, is a moot point.
Morris’s Socialism, derived largely from Ruskin,
was concerned less with material gain for the working
population than with a readjustment of society that
would make all men happy and self-reliant in their
work, and once more producers of the sort of spontan
eous beauty in everything wrought by their hands that
we associate with the almost faultless craftmanship
of the thirteenth century. That this was bound to
come after the abolition of the capitalist system and
of commercialism was, in the eighties, of the nature
of a religious belief with Morris, who had long aban
doned the dogmas of the Church to which he and Burne-
Jones had once intended to devote their lives. In
his early ardour as a convert to Socialism he cher
ished the hope of an upheaval that would bring about
the required conditions in his own lifetime. But a
closer study of his fellow-citizens, and especially
of his fellow-Socialists, and above all some clashes
with the police which showed him how powerless was
an untrained mob against a small disciplined force,
cured him of this dream. He was also obliged regret
fully to surrender the fallacy that, given two alter
native propositions, one wise the other foolish, or
189
one taking beauty into consideration and the other ig
noring it, the majority of voters would automatically
demand wisdom and beauty. It must have been after
some such disillusionment that he once exclaimed to
me, with a twinkle in his eye, 'I am in favour of an
absolute dictator agreeing on all points with myselfI 1
If we pause to consider what advances in social
conditions have taken place in England since this
book was written, it cannot be claimed that many of
them are obviously due to the teaching of Morris and
Ruskin. The life of the workman during the twentieth
century, instead of approximating the idyllic pictures
drawn in News from Nowhere, has become more elaborate
ly regulated than it was at any previous time. It is
manifest that the machine has won the battle, and
that, instead of the majority of workmen finding
pleasure in their handiwork and producing spontaneous
beauty, they are for the most part compelled to sub
mit to a monotonous routine and to get their pleasure
from the cinema. Nevertheless, there have been great
compensations. Their hours are far shorter than they
used to be, their homes are brighter, conditions in
mines and factories have been much improved, and
greater educational and recreational facilities are
within their reach. These and other ameliorations
have been brought about by the persistent efforts of
many public-spirited men and women, some of them in
fluenced by Ruskin and Morris; as well as by combina
tions and unions that have made the worker far more
powerful than he was in the last century. Morris and
Ruskin would, of course, have welcomed these changes
— they had indeed advocated many of them strenuously.
But would they not have felt that the part of their
message on which they were most insistent had fallen
on deaf ears? Even so, it was not delivered in vain.
These two pioneers have now had generations of fol
lowers, and much of their teaching has been woven im
perceptibly into the mental fabric of us all. If the
revolution now in progress does not openly embrace
it, nevertheless, it owes much to their prophetic
fervour, which, in various distillations, will long
continue to benefit mankind.^9
The three characteristics which Sir Sydney mentioned
in the former of the paragraphs were the same as three of
the main characteristics to be found in Morris's lectures
1 9
London, 1950, pp. xvi-xviii.
190
and hence in his broad social program. Happiness, self-
reliance, and the production of spontaneous beauty agreed
with the following characteristics according to the num
bers in the outline of the fourteen characteristics: num
bers 10 (happiness), 1 and 7 (freedom, and use of products
as the basis for exchange), and 3 (opportunity for parti
cipation in creative artistry).
That Morris was "cured of this dream" is a point with
which Mr. Thompson would entirely disagree. So far as can
be ascertained in this study, Morris never gave up his
dream; he hoped for the ideal society under socialism all
his life.
A stubborn fact that Sir Sydney apparently forgot
(but which Mr. Thompson did not) was that Morris insisted
as late as two years before his death that he was a So
cialist. Under the title "How I Became a Socialist" he
contributed the following in 1894:
I am asked by the Editor to give some sort of his
tory of the above conversion, and I feel that it may
be of some use to do so, if my readers will look upon
me as a type of a certain group of people, but not so
easy to do clearly, briefly and truly. Let me, how
ever, try. But first, I will say what I mean by
being a Socialist, since I am told that the word no
longer expresses definitely and with certainty what
it did ten years ago. Well, what I mean by Social
ism is a condition of society in which there should
be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master's
man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick
brain workers, nor heart-sick hand workers, in a
word, in which all men would be living in equality
of condition, and would manage their affairs unwaste-
fully, and with the full consciousness that harm to
one would mean harm to all— the realization at last
191
of the word COMMONWEALTH.
How this view of Socialism which I hold to-day,
and hope to die holding, is what I "began with ....
(Italics mine) (Collected Works, XXIII, 277)
George Bernard Shaw began his account of "Morris as
I Knew Him" with the following paragraph:
Morris, when he had to define himself politically,
called himself a Communist. Yery often, of course,
in discussing Socialism he had to speak of himself as
! a Socialist; but he jibbed at it internally, and flat
ly rebelled against such faction labels as Soeial-
democrat and the like. He knew that the essential
term, etymologically, historically, and artistically,
was Communist; and it was the only word he was com
fortable with. (Supplement I, ix)
20
Holbrook Jackson’s study of Morris discussed five
of the characteristics of his ideal society, special
stress being placed upon (1) freedom, (2) the opportunity
for pleasureful work in beautiful surroundings, and (5)
decentralization of government. Mr. Jackson then men
tioned (4) social equality and (13) communal living, the
former a strong characteristic of Morris’s whole plan for
the better society, the latter discussed chiefly in News
from Nowhere and in The House of the Wolfings.
Although Morris called himself a communist rather
than a socialist, it is important to note that Morris,
according to Mr. Jackson, "would have loathed both the
theories and practices of Russian Communism."
In none of his activities was Morris more ’out of
his due time' than in his Socialism. His whole asso
ciation with the -Socialist movement was a tragedy:
?0
_______ Villiam Morris (London, 1908, rev, edn., 1924)*___
192
a tragedy born of the contest between one who was by
nature a Socialist, and others who were but the advo
cates of Socialism. He was so much of a Socialist
himself that he could have stepped out of the turmoil
of our acquisitive age into the commonwealth of man
without the slightest inconvenience. Training and
transition were not necessary for him, he was born
for the communal life. He had the gifts of disinter
ested service and joyful work without which Socialism
were impossible. That is why he at first imagined
his dream could be realized suddenly. Socialism was
an extension of himself, a multiplication of William
Morris. He did not realize his own rarity until his
life was nearly over. (pp. 120-121)
He was never really a believer in State Socialism, or
what we should now call Collectivism, with the whole
machinery of production and distribution under the
control of an all-powerful central organization, and
he would have loathed both the theories and practices
of Russian Communism. He demanded complete equality
of condition, so that each individual should have
sufficient margin to his life for the free play of
whatsoever personality and idiosyncrasy he had within
him, in so far as their expression in nowise endan
gered a similar freedom for all. This was what he
meant by equality. That prodigal love of colour and
design which animated all he ever did was revolted
at the regularity and uniformity of such State So
cialism as that imagined by Bellamy, or that implied
by the institutional methods of either a Sidney Webb
or a Lenin. . . . (p. 121)
NEWS EROM NOWHERE, with its vision of a pastoral life
of humanized associations, was Morris’s reply to
LOOKING BACKWARD with its vast mechanical organiza
tion of town life. Association and decentralization
were the passwords to his Utopia, and these were to
be the means to the fullest expression of the "pleas
ure in work itself,' which was the underlying princi
ple of his belief in politics, economics, and art.
He was convinced that the problem of the organiza
tion of life could not be dealt with by centraliza
tion on a national scale, 'working by a kind of magic
for which no one feels himself responsible.' On the
contrary, he saw that it would be necessary for the
unit of administration to be so small as to enable
every individual in the community to feel that he was
a responsible and interested party in the conduct of
the state. His aim was not merely the socialization
of property, but the communalization of social________
193
feeling, the awakening of social consciousness in
such a way as to abolish any sense of the state as a
thing apart from the individual, (p. 122)
In the following three paragraphs by Mr. Jackson,
which represent something of a summary of his position on
Morris’s society, he discussed the decentralization of
government as well as the ideals of freedom, the opportu
nity for pleasureful work, and social equality. However,
at the end he extended his discussion to include A Dream
of John Ball and so of course included the ideal of fel
lowship around which ideal this tale was told.
Ho family would be richer than its neighbour and none
would be poor, and the fullest possible freedom would
exist for all. So long as there was any necessity
for a central State Department its duty would be eon-
fined to seeing that no individual allowed the ex
pression of his freedom to interfere with the freedom
of another, and to advising upon errors in the pro
duction and distribution of the communal property;
but as soon as the principles underlying the state
were reeognized by everyone always and intuitively,
the last vestiges of centralization would die out.
Variety of life Morris considered as much a part of
Communism as equality of condition, and this could
only be fully attained through work which had become
art. (p. 123)
The state would be a federation of individuals,
just as the world would be a federation of communi
ties, and exchange would be friendly instead of com
mercial. Rivalry for profit would be replaced by
rivalry of excellence; production would be thus im
proved in quality, and the freeing of men from fash
ionable or enforced idleness would increase its quan
tity also. The waste of cheapness would cease, and
as the anxiety of men became removed entirely from
the economic arena, they would be free to test to
the full the intellectual and imaginative treasures
of life. (p. 124)
In the vision of this work his gospel grows prophet
ic, and out of the deeps of his love of men he raises
194
aloft his voice in the cause of fellowship. The re
ligion of Morris is contained in that word. fFellow
ship is life, and lack of fellowship is death,1 says
the Seer of Kent in A DREAM OF JOHN BALL, the hook
into which Morris put his fullest utterances upon
human life. (pp. 127-128)
The following extracts from Elisabeth Cary's William
Morris, Poet, Craftsman, Socialist (Mew York, 1902), one
of the earliest hooks written ahout Morris, were centered
on Mews from Mowhere. She discussed most of the charac
teristics of Morris's ideal society although she was in
considerable doubt as to whether this romance was a vision
or whether it was a genuine picture of the society which
Morris hoped would result when all people became aware of
their interdependence and when they really practiced the
i
Golden Rule.
Gary was disappointed with the superficiality of the
people of Mowhere and did not approve of freedom (espe
cially in the matter of human love relationships) that
Morris held in such high esteem. She was delighted in
their creativity and in their desire for beautiful things,
but she could not accept Morris's belief that pleasureful
work, however pleasant the conditions, would cure all of
man's evils. She would not accept a society without a
social or economic structure any stronger than the one
Morris envisioned for his Mowhere.
There is little here [in Mews from Mowherel to
charm the logically constructed mind, acquainted with
human nature, and in the lectures setting forth in
more detail and with more attempt at practical___________
195
teaching the methods by which society could be en
lightened and raised to his standard of excellence,
Morris boldly invites the scorn of the political econ
omist by the wholly visionary character of his pathet
ically "reasonable" views. Nevertheless, he was not
without an instinct for distinguishing social evils
and suggesting right remedies. Strip his doctrines
of their exaggerated conclusions from false premises,
and it is possible to find in them the seeds of many
reforms that have come about to the inestimable bene
fit of the modern world. In his lecture on Useful
Work versus Useless foil . . . he advocates the kind
of education that is directed toward finding out what
different people are fit for, and helping them along
the road which they are inclined to take. He would
have young people taught "such handicrafts as they
had a turn for as a part of their education, the dis
cipline of their minds and bodies; and adults would
also have opportunities of learning in the same
schools." He preaches the necessity of agreeable
surroundings, claiming that science duly applied
would get rid of the smoke, stench, and noise of fac
tories, and that factories and buildings in which
work is carried on should be made decent, convenient,
and beautiful, while workers should be given opportu
nities of living in quiet country homes, in small
towns, or in industrial colleges, instead of being
obliged to "pig together" in close city quarters.
(pp. 165-166)
Just why Morris with his extreme independence
stopped short of Anarchism is difficult to see unless
it be attributed to an instinct for order inherited
from the sturdy stock to which he belonged. The ne
cessity of a public rule of action was always, how
ever, quite clear to him. He contended that you
have a right to do as you like so long as you do not
interfere with your neighbour's right to do as he
likes, a contention which not even a fairly conserva
tive mind finds very difficult to uphold: he was not
willing to admit the right of an individual to act
"unsocially." Indeed all the charm of his pictures
of the ideal life derives from the atmosphere of
loving-kindness and mutual helpfulness with which he
surrounds them. The Golden Rule was always in his
mind as he built up in his imagination his Paradise
on earth. He possessed the optimism of the kind-heart
ed, the faith in his fellow men that made him sure
of their right acting could they only start afresh
with a field clear of injury and abuse. He never
dreamed in all his dreaming that these would
196
again grow up and destroy the beautiful fabric of his
society, so bright and unspotted in his mind. Of
course there would be a social conscience "which be
ing social, is common to every man." Without that
there could be no society; and "Man without society
is not only impossible but inconceivable." (pp. 188-
189)
Gary's summary of Mews from Nowhere was one with
which most of the critics writing after her have agreed:
The image is before us in Mews from Nowhere of a life
as busy and as bright as that of the ancient Greeks,
whose cunning hands could do anything save divide use
from beauty. As a natural consequence of happy la
bour, the inhabitants of Nowhere have also the superb
health and personal beauty of the Greeks. Their wom
en of forty and fifty have smooth skins and fresh
colour, bright eyes and a free walk. Their men have
no knowledge of wrinkles and grey hairs. Everywhere
is the freshness and sparkle of the morning. The
pleasant homes nestle in peaceful security among the
lavish fruits of the earth. The water of the Thames
flows clean and clear between its banks; the fra
grance of flowers pervades the pages and suggests
perpetual summer; athletic sports are mingled with
athletic occupations. There is little studying. His
tory is sad and often shameful— why then study it?
Knowledge of geography is not important; it comes to
those who care to travel. Languages one naturally
picks up from intercourse with the people of other
countries. Political economy? When one practices
good fellowship what need of theories? Mathematics?
They would wrinkle the brow; moreover, one learns
all that is necessary by building houses and bridges
and putting things together in the right way. It is
not surprising that in this buoyant life filled with
active interests, the religion of which is good-will
and mutual helpfulness, the thought of death is not
a welcome one. A dweller in Nowhere admits that in
the autumn he almost believes in death; but no one
entertains such a belief longer than he must. Thus
we get in this fair idyll the purely visible side of
a society depicted. The depths of the human heart
and of the human soul are left unsounded. To have
what they desire, what is claimed by their hands, by
their eyes, by their senses, is the aim of the peo
ple. Renunciation, like mathematics, would wrinkle
the brow. Arbitrary restraint is not to be consid-
ered. Nothing is binding, neither marriage vow nor
197
labour contract, or, to speak more precisely, neither
marriage vow nor contract for labour exists. The peo
ple live, as we are told, as some of the so-called
savages in the South Seas really do live,— in a state
of interdependence so perfect that if an individual
lays down an obligation the community picks it up.
For the fading of life, for the death that may not
delay till autumn to thrust itself upon the attention,
for the development of spiritual strength to meet an
enemy against whom art and beauty will not avail, for
the battle with those temptations of the flesh that
are not averted by health and comeliness, no provision
is made. The author’s philosophy is that work, under
pleasant conditions will do away with all the evils
of both soul and body.
As a document for active Socialists News from No
where is not effective. Absolutely without any basis
of economic generalization, it is merely the fabric
of a vision. At the time of writing it Morris was
cutting the last threads that bound him to convention
al Socialist bodies. He was making ready to live
again, so far as modernity would let him, the life he
loved. "No work that cannot be done with pleasure in
the doing is worth doing," was the maxim counted by
him of the first importance, and assuredly he had not
found pleasure in the management of Socialist organ
izations. His last Socialist book rings with the joy
of his release, (pp. 211-213)
In a recent book Jby John H. Rosenberg, The Darkening
G-lass, a Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York, 1961), the
author added some important insights into Morris’s Social
ism by way of which he was able to make some comments on
News from Nowhere to be found nowhere else.
While Sir Sydney Cockerell said merely that Morris's
socialism was derived mostly from Ruskin, Rosenberg made
clear that the picture of the ideal society that Morris
projected had roots that ran much deeper than the nine
teenth century. If one suspected this (and knew that Mor-
jris as a student of history seemed to want to have civil
198
zation spiral forward by first returning to the past for
its inspiration and form and then go on to the future) he
found no specific suggestions in Morris's works that
linked the medieval period with the nineteenth century,
except perhaps for Carlyle’s Past and Present. Rosenberg
asserted that Morris linked ’ ’romanticism to the Gothic
revival and both of them to social reform” by way of a
tradition that must include the scholarly researches of
A. Welby Pugin (1812-1852), whom, as far as I can ascer
tain, Morris did not seem to know. Mews from Mowhere ap
peared to Rosenberg to be the flowering of a plant whose
roots extended beyond John Ruskin into Pugin; his re
searches may well ask for a revaluation of the contribu
tion of Ruskin. Apparently Morris did not know that his
debt to his understanding of the spirit and nature of
Gothic (which formed the basis for his ideal society) ex
tended further than to John Ruskin.
The great, gray edifice of Ruskin’s Welfare State—
bureaucratic, matter-of-fact— is equally indebted to
an even more antique vision which Ruskin’s disciple,
William Morris, expressed with singular force in his
socialist utopia, Mews from Mowhere. Morris had
studied Marx as well as Ruskin and had become con
vinced that only by a violent usurpation of power
could the masses free themselves from their masters.
With documentary horror he depicts a bloody class-
war fought in the streets of London. Once the work
ers win the revolution, however, Morris constructs a
society which is the antithesis of an industrialized,
centralized, Communist state. His England of the re
mote future consists of small, idyllic villages scat
tered throughout a garden paradise. If Morris's rev
olution has the actuality of history, his utopia con-
I veys the deeper conviction of an enduring myth.
199
Despite its initially Marxist orientation, Morris's
prophecy of England in the year 2200 reverts to a
kind of pre-industrial Golden Age, an English Eden
from which the smoke of industry has cleared to re
veal a second Earthly Paradise. (Rosenberg, p. 144)
The more [A. Welby] Pugin studied medieval archi
tecture, the more convinced he became that Gothic
was not a style but a way of life. So conceived and
so desired, Gothic might become a means of reforming
England socially and religiously. With the image of
countless begrimed and stunted London churches of
the Revival before us, it is almost impossible to
conceive of the holy enthusiasm which once filled its
supporters. But the revival appears less of a mys
tery if we see it as a part of the larger European
movement which transformed all the arts and made
architecture a subject of vital concern, (p. 51)
The argument in pictures was even more effective
than the argument in words. One of the plates (they
were all engraved by Pugin, who, like Ruskin, illus
trated his own books) depicts a Catholic town of 1440
and is paired with a satire of the same town in 1840.
The first shows a walled town dominated by a magnifi
cent Late Gothic abbey on its outskirts. It is a
kind of medieval idyl, with innumerable delicate
spires, high-gabled houses, and, in the foreground,
a broad stream crossed by a stone bridge on which
stands a little chapel. In the modern town the abbey
is in ruins and the foreground is overpowered by a
hideous, windowless jail. Factory chimneys and the
smokestack of a huge gas works replace the spires.
The churches have either been destroyed, chopped down
to a kind of truncated Gothic, or stunted into a boxy
Renaissance.
Pugin used the Gothic city not for esthetic pur
poses but as an instrument of radical propaganda.
Like Ruskin, he made architecture important because
he conceived it as a means of reshaping the national
life. The revival of the Middle Ages was only in
part an escape from the tensions and ugliness of in
dustrial civilization. At bottom it was an attempt,
however fated to failure, to revolutionize that civi
lization. Pugin's two cities were a recurrent meta
phor which became increasingly common as England was
defaced by industrialism and her laborers were en
slaved by the machine.
The medieval town is a kind of Heavenly City,
ideally beautiful, humane and at peace; the modern is
200
an inferno filled with sulphurous smoke and the rest
lessness of unsatisfied needs. The two cities appear
in Carlyle’s Past and Present, with its splendid evo
cation of medieval St. Edmundsbury played off against
Manchester’s brutal suppression of the cotton opera
tives. The cities reappear in Dicken's Hard Times,
in which Choketown's serpentine coils of factory
smoke, blackened bricks, and foul-smelling river con
trasts with the single remnant of Merrie England,
Sleary's circus. Tennyson’s Gamelot, before Arthur’s
realm ’ ’reels back into the beast,” is the classic
nineteenth-century image of the heavenly Gothic city.
William Morris, Ruskin's disciple, juxtaposes the
surviving Gothic cathedral which rises above a modern
factory town and the
monotonous hideousness of dwelling-houses for the
artisans; here the gang of field-labourers; twelve
shillings a week for ever and ever, and the work
house for all day of judgment, of rewards and pun
ishment; on each side and all around the nineteenth
eentury and rising solemnly in the midst of it,
that token of the ’ ’dark ages,” their hope in the
past, grown now a warning for our future.
Morris followed Ruskin’s path from the arts to social
reform, with Gothic playing the same central role in
his career. As an undergraduate he helped Rossetti
decorate the Oxford Union with quaint designs from
Arthurian legend. His verse— he himself described it
as "the idle singing of an empty day”— recaptures the
ambience of medieval romance. But after reading Rus
kin ’s chapter ”0n the Nature of Gothic,” he sought to
create a society in whieh "an art made by the people
for the people” might flourish and the wage slavery
of industrialism be replaced by a return to an agrar
ian, communal life. The author of The Defense [sicj
of Guenevere and The Earthly Paradise eventually
joined the Social Democratic Federation and founded
the radical Social League. Morris is the most ex
treme instance, as Ruskin is the most influential,
of the bond linking romanticism to the Gothic revi
val, and both to social reform. |pp. 51-53)
The inclusion of passages from Mr. Graham Hough's
The Last Romantics (New York, 1961), is warranted because
he too discussed many of Morris's characteristics of an
ideal human society in the light of the same tradition
201
that Mr. Rosenberg proved himself aware of in The Darken
ing Glass. The intrusion and importance of the Gothic
influence was one of the topics that he investigated
thoroughly, and he agreed with Mr. Rosenberg that we need
to be aware of the influence of medievalism on the social
thinking of several idealists, socialists, and aestheti-
cians of the nineteenth century. He, too, demonstrated
the similarity between Morris's thinking and that of A. ¥.
Pugin. His summary of News from Nowhere in the light of
his own awareness of romanticism as a dying tradition cast
another bright light on this utopian romance, especially
insofar as Morris's ideals of freedom, artistic creativity
and social equality were concerned. Hough made clear as
did no one else the reason that artistic creativity was
an essential part of the ideal society that was derived
from the Gothic tradition. Hough thought that News from
Nowhere was too impractical to be considered a utopia,
but he found in it the reality of a myth:
The England of News from Nowhere is another Earthly
Paradise, but one that is attached to the contempo
rary world by a slender thread of social analysis.
Morris is trying to present his dream in the light of
waking knowledge, and the most surprising feature of
the book is not its unreality, but how nearly he suc
ceeds. It is doubtful whether the social analysis
contributes much to this. The book derives is [siej
strength from another source— it has the reality of
a myth. Myths are after all fundamental to the psy
chic life: no demonstration of what is merely pos
sible can fill the minds of men unless it can draw
energy from these underground sources: and no merely
personal or fashionable fantasy can do so, except for
i a limited time and class. The romantic writers had_____
202
been working since the late eighteenth century for a
revival of mythology, and the pre-Raphaelites had
transferred some of the same motives to art; but
most of the fantasies remained obstinately private
and rarely achieved the status and validity of myth.
Morris achieves it in News from Nowhere alone. This
tenuous sketch of an idealised suburban life, in
which there is no painfully hard work, no poverty,
no passion that cannot be fairly contained by the
social organism; this world where labour is an art,
and the ordinary things of use are works of art, has
really very little to do with modern Socialism or
the result of an economic revolution. It is the nine
teenth-century restatement of one of the most persis
tent visions of mankind.
Prom the point of view of this discussion it is
also something else. Morris’s Socialism is almost
the only attempt to embody the Ruskin-pre-Raphaelite
ethos in an actual political programme. It was a
brief and transitory phase of the Socialist movement;
and when Morris is cited to-day as one of the Labour
pioneers it is by people who have a strictly quali
fied sympathy with his ideas. Nor would it be true
to say that his work has had even an indirect effect
on the development of Socialist thought. By the end
of his life the relative failure of his attempt to
ally politics and the arts was already evident. Mor
ris’s historic importance is that he made this clear.
He made his attempt and it failed; and the next in
heritors of the aesthetic tradition gave up the
attempt. (Hough, pp. 112-113)
If Morris’s socialism was not practical, it was the
embodiment in a political program of many ideas that
Morris found in Ruskin. Hough, however, found very prac
tical Morris's suggestion that art may become man’s alter
native occupation as the new socialism increases his
leisure.
What may yet prove to be the most fruitful of Mor
ris's ideas is that art may become, as in News from
Nowhere, the alternative occupation of people whose
ordinary employment is elsewhere. All Morris's ef
forts to build the arts into the social fabric broke
down, and it is difficult to see a happier fate for
most modern attempts in the same direction. What
203
cannot break down is the fact that art of some kind
will continue to be produced because there will always
be some people who wish to produce it. The principle
has long been accepted by writers; nobody tries to ex
tract a living from a stony world by writing poetry,
fainting and sculpture today have similarly lost most
of their economic and social justification. What may
save them is Morris's principle that art is man's
pleasure in his work. It need not be the work soci
ety pays him for. (pp. 101-102)
News from Nowhere received considerable critical at
tention after it was published in book form in Boston
(1890) and in London the next year. The earliest review
21
of this work appeared in The Academy (London), on May
23, 1891. The untitled article was written by Lionel
Johnson, who disliked Looking Backward apparently as much
as did Morris. We have Bruce Glasier's word that Morris
wrote News from Nowhere "in protest against Bellamy's
22
'Looking Backward'," and Mr. Johnson asserted in his
first paragraph that that book should be burned. In con
trast to Bellamy's mechanical civilization, "Mr. Morris
here shows us," Johnson said, "what sort of life he would
like to live, what is his conception of mens sana in
corpore sano. And from that point of view we will dwell
upon the book. . . ."
The two characteristics of Morris's ideal human soci
ety with which Mr. Johnson was chiefly concerned were
pleasure in work and man's delight in physical life.
21XXXIX, 483-484.
Glasier, p. 150.
204
. . . let us consider it as a vision of the Promised
Land. The two chief tenets of this new faith are
these: pleasure in work is the secret of art and of
content; delight in physical life upon the earth is
the natural state of man. Whatever interferes with
that pleasure and with delight, is wrong. . . .
Johnson agreed perfectly with Morris when he said in
this review:
Life has hecome endlessly complicated "by all sorts of
interests and of wants, that do not make life happier;
we must simplify ourselves, and return to the "primal
sanities'* of nature. That fine phrase of Mr. Whitman
describes the spirit of this book: we are sophisti
cated, let us go home to the early "primal” sources
of simplicity and joy; we are perplexed, let us go
back to the sources of "sanity" and strength. Upon
the relations of art and work, no one is any longer
doubtful where the truth lies.
In the last paragraph of his review Mr. Johnson said,
"But there is so much beauty, so much strength, so much
sanity in this short book, that our chief thoughts of it
must be thoughts of gratitude." Thus, he seemed to ap
prove of the work, but earlier in the article he had
called the book something other than sane: ". . .we can
not help having a general impression that Mr. Morris's
Utopia or Arcadia, for all its beauty and its energy,
would be a little stupid."
Uo one else, so far as I know, has repeated Johnson’s
suggestion found below that Morris's conception of what
man should be was similar to Aristotle's.
Upon the whole, his conception of man, as he
should be has much in common with Aristotle's . . .
in the moral ideas of man's character and business.
"A long life of virtuous activity, according to your
own nature, and as developed by exercise." (Aristotle's
205
definition.) Mr. Morris would accept that definition
of a good life. But it includes the full development
of all the faculties; one cannot do duty for another.
One man is good at harvest, and another over painting,
and a third in literature; now Mr. Morris at times is
inclined to say, that if you are serviceable in the
fields, it will do instead of improving your mind
with books.
Mr. Johnson was disturbed that, although Morris de
scribed the revolution that he said accounted for the
changes resulting in Nowhere, Morris did not show how this
society evolved from the period of revolutionary change.
An anonymous, untitled review'of News from Nowhere
appeared in The Critic (New York) on May 30, 1891.
The cavalier treatment given the work seemed to indicate
that the writer had not read more than about one-third of
it, for he told about the beginning and then made the
following general comment:
Utopias are the fashion of the day; existing con
ditions and actualities seem so very unsatisfactory
that men seek to escape from them in imagination at
least and take refuge in ideal systems and societies
of the future. Mr. Morris's scheme, however, can
hardly be dignified by the name of Utopia; it reads
more like a burlesque than anything we have ever
come across that was intended to be taken seriously
by any but babes and sucklings.
This is an example of a review that is so unspecific
as to say nothing to a reader who would like to learn
something about the work discussed.
The Athenaeum for June 13» 1891, contained an un
signed review of News from Nowhere entitled "A New
25XVIII, N.S. 285.
206
24
Utopia. " The writer had read News from Nowhere "but he
frequently disagreed with Morris, and in one case (on the
matter of education in Nowhere) he was quite wrong in
saying that no education existed.
The writer of this review criticized adversely three
of Morris’s ideals: social equality, the universal oppor
tunity for education, and the attitude toward pleasureful
work. He found himself unable to accept Morris's unstruc
tured society and said that man with his historical memory
(and, hence, traditions) and with the powers of heredity
would create a society of high and low as he always had.
One of the most powerful factors of progress . . .
was, of course, historic memory— memory of race,
carried on by tradition at first, and afterwards by
visual signs. Historic memory has lent what Mr. Mor
ris admirably calls a "sting of heredity" such as all
other communities of the animal kingdom are entirely
free from.
Of course the organic power of heredity is at work
in all creatures.
The writer then gave several examples of water buf
faloes and other offspring of good sires, which had to
take their places in their societies according to their
individual qualities. Human beings, likewise, were or
dered according to their qualities, except:".in the cases of
some traditional qualities which kept some inheritors of
power at the top. So strong was memory or tradition, he
argued, that he could not believe that the kind of social
24I, 757-759.
207
equality that Morris favored could he possible among men.
. . . hitherto all civilization, although its power
should be employed in taking out the sting of hered
ity, has worked towards exaggerating the power of the
sting. And the question is whether it will or can
ever be otherwise— whether it is not an infirmity in
grained in man’s very nature; and, if so, human per
fectibility or anything approaching to it will remain
impossible, and the idealist has only to take the
world for what it is worth and hope for a future life.
The great mistake into which Mr. Morris falls is
. . . the mistake of overestimating man's place in
the universe. The royalties and aristocracies of
other gregarious animals are entirely functional; and
it is when we study the beautiful economics of an ant-*-
hill that the absurdity of civilized man becomes over
whelming in its humour.
The writer’s remarks below, about ’ ’the absence of all
education" indicated that he had not read News from No
where thoroughly or that he misinterpreted what Morris
said about education in Nowhere. Morris specifically
called for a great deal of education in his Utopia. This
is discussed in Chapter I of this study in the recapitu
lation of characteristic number six, the opportunity for
universal education.
While the inventors of ideal states of society de
pict a people that is at least abreast of the know
ledge of its time, Mr. Morris paints a people that
has forgotten nine-tenths of what the world has been
laboriously learning. Nor instance, while the very
first thing promised by every other Utopia is a uni
versal education, the absence of all education is a
fundamental part of Mr. Morris's scheme. Nowhere—
that land where one century is just as good as an
other, provided that it be in every particular the
exact opposite of the nineteenth century.
The last characteristic of the ideal society that
this critic touched on was the condition of work. He did
208
not accept Morris’s suggestion that men would enjoy their
work in the ideal state and used as an example the "Golden
Dustman” in the story, the chimney sweep who dressed in a
heautiful embroidered gown and during his off-duty hours
from his work discussed literature with his neighbors.
So the services which Plato could find none but
slaves to perform are here cheerfully executed by the
most resplendent creature in Utopia. As this shows,
we think, that Mr. Morris has never read the defini
tion of "Work” and "Sport” which we extracted from
the ’Nature-worshipper’s Dictionary’ when writing of
Thoreau many years ago, it seems necessary to direct
his attention to it:—
"Work: that activity of mind or body which ex
hausts the vital forces without yielding pleasure or
health to the individual. Sport: that activity of
mind or body which, in exhausting the vital forces,
yields pleasure and health to the individual. The
activity, however severe, of a born artist, at his
easel, of a born poet to his rhymings, of a born car
penter at his plane, is sport. The activity, however
slight, of a born artist or poet at the merchant’s
desk is work. Hence to work is not to pray— far from
it."
The author of the preceding critique did not seem to un
derstand that work among the dwellers of Nowhere was close
to what he called "Sport."
The unnamed author of a review of this same book
published, also in June of 1891> a long, favorable comment
25
on the work. He had read News from Nowhere with care
and with sympathy and found Morris's Nowhere to be ". . .
a realm in which Justice, and Peace, and Love, no longer
idealized in a remote region above the stars, have come
2" ’ Review of Reviews, III, 549-553.
209
down and taken up their abode with men.” The reviewer
quoted considerably from the book to give some of its fla
vor and then mentioned many characteristics of Nowhere.
He was pleased to find that the one worry that people had
was that they might have a shortage of work; this was a
problem because the people longed for work as a recreaticn
and as a means of keeping themselves physically fit. The
reviewer called Nowhere "an Arcadia of art" because every
one was encouraged from the earliest age to be artisti
cally creative. "Universal brotherhood prevails," he
said, and hence he approved of Morris’s ideal of social
equality. He seemed willing to try the non-monetary sys
tem that Morris invented for Nowhere and liked the ideal
of having to trade the results of labor instead of using
money. He admired the spiritual and physical health of
the people who knew not poverty, disease, or crime and so
were happy, whose villages were full of mirth and chil
dren's laughter, who all had enough to eat.
One of the fullest discussions of News from Nowhere
is an article by Maurice Hewlett entitled "A Materialist's
26
Paradise." A deep note of incredulity ran through this
critique from its beginning, which said that Morris had
"been ravished away into constructing a future which shall
consist mainly of rejuvenated relics." Mr. Hewlett had
^National Review (London), XVII (August 1891),
818-827” ________________________________________
210
obviously studied Morris’s work very carefully, but, un
like the previous reviewer, he was not delighted by the
picture of the future society that Morris painted.
But does Mr. Morris (who may have a sense of hu
mour somewhere) wish to be taken seriously? I pay him
the doubtful compliment of believing that he does, and
venture to indicate the two fallacies which betray his
structure. He has, I conceive, exaggerated the depen
dence of human nature upon its environment: he is
convinced that the conditions of human welfare are
physical. Grounding on the first, he would violently
overthrow institutions and compel freedom; enraptured
with the second, he has allowed his perceptions to
govern his reason. The result is not an earthly, but
an earthy, paradise; and the change of adjective
makes all the difference between an honest recogni
tion of rank and a state of blank complacency which
in a savage or one of the lower animals we should
call grovelling.
The happiness that emanated from all the people of
Nowhere in their loving attitudes toward each other and
even to the stranger among them, who told the story, dis
turbed Mr. Hewlett:
. . . the units of the world kissed freely, and man
kind was really akin. So deep-seated, so far-reach
ing, was this sense of brotherhood, that all the
watchdogs of society hitherto known to experience—
parliaments, police, soldiers and sailors, priests
and newspapers— had vanished or been relegated as
curious relics (duly labelled) to museums and nation
al galleries. There was no organizations for nation
al defence: the Continent appears to have shared the
lack of things defendable. There were none for mu
tual defence: every man was coheir of his nieghbours.
Community of goods, free exchange of husbands or
wives, exemption from authority external or internal,
of conscience or police, complete fairly enough the
attributes of the new State.
Yet with all this and much which was strangely
new, Mr. Morris found a great deal which was old,
much which his trained eye detected to be "fourteenth-
century work." "Furnishings, etc. and manners were
from the time of Chaucer." There was an appreciation
211
of Nature and her simpler manifestations reminiscent
of Chaucer; there was a keenness of sensuous pleas
ure never attained by our English poet and, plainly,
nourished on Boccaccio. By the side of this there
was a delight in laborious work, in physical toil,
and a corresponding distrust of books and learning
which must be confessed a strikingly new feature, not
warranted by experience of History or of Nature but
springing from causes whose ultimate roots Mr. Morris
was at no pains to probe deep. The population had not
increased for a hundred and fifty years, and yet was
wholly altered in physique as well as temper. The
English nation had disappeared. The race was now
Italian: artistic, not serious; sensuous, not specu
lative; emotional and yet superficial; energetic and
yet self-indulgent.
Mr. Hewlett was not happy with the new people whom
Morris had created:
A race of fleshly perfection, worshipping phenomena,
relying on appearance, arguing from sensation; a na
tion of strong men and fair women, conscious of
their own growth and of their country’s, owning an
art which springs from and is directed by Nature,
Simplicity, Truth, which yet sees no significance,
no shadow behind those comely forms, dreams no fu
ture, owns no standards, accepts no explanation,
needs no satisfying. This is a strange race, impos
sible, and to most of us unsavoury. Moreover, these
wild results are to spring from the slaughter of "com
mercialism," and the extinction of class slavery.
If Morris had read this review he would have been
most deeply affected by Mr. Hewlett’s conclusion, for Mor
ris thought of himself as a student of history, and it
cannot be denied that that knowledge of the past should
have helped him shape the future society, as Mr. Hewlett
indicated:
But Mr. Morris . . . must face facts, he must (he
really must) read history. And if History tell him
that the spirit of the time (not the spirit of a
clique or two) is for Socialism and not for Individ
ualism; if she tell him that humanity can be
212
transformed by transforming the institutions which
are of its own making; if she tell him that free love
by the light of Nature and the pampered lives of in
telligent animals will stimulate innocence, fine art,
and the higher existence; if she tell him that it is
possible to revive the accidents of the fourteenth-
century without a vestige of the religion which (good
or bad, Catholic or Lollard) was its very breath; if,
lastly, she assure him that the good of the Race has
been best served by indulging the appetites of its
grosser parts and leaving the soul to find its level
in a slough of sensuality and drowsy oblivion— if
History tell him this, there's an end of the matter.
History cannot lie, though Historians can. But His
tory will tell him nothing of the kind. The course
of the world tends otherwise.
Mr. Hewlett's rather excoriating review was followed
the next month by an unsigned, untitled article which dis-
27
cussed News from Nowhere along with six other works.
This review represented some of the views of a political
economist and the extreme of reaction against Morris's
social ideal.
Of all the seers who have woven visions of the fu
ture into a tale, Mr. Morris is the most original,
while, from the political economist’s point of view,
he is doubtless the most insane.
The prophets of a coming Socialist's paradise always
find it essential to paint the present in darkest
colors. England of today, according to Mr. Morris,
is rotten to the core, quite gone to the dogs. An
evil spirit dominates the land, destruction of all
that is good and beautiful, creative of endless mis
ery— to wit, the spirit of commercialism. The only
religion is a worship of a hideous abstraction called
the "world's market."
This presentation of the eternal labor question is
exceedingly picturesque, and there is a polished fe
rocity about the indictment of the rich yet vulgar,
[ nn
'Nation (New York), LIII (September 24, 1891),
24±rM2_._________________________________________________
213
which makes it most enjoyable reading for the culti
vated though poor, life is change. When things are
bad as bad can be, they must take a turn for the bet
ter. Out of exasperation comes war, and, through war
annihilation of privilege and politics and machinery
and commerce. Then, by process ingeniously described,
is born a new England, a free, noble, idyllic, commune,
in which years pile up joys and where human life is
not the once hideous mistake of nature. 'Nowhere' is
certainly a much more attractive commune than is Mr.
Bellamy's Boston of the future, for . . . each indi
vidual is permitted the luxury of having business of
his own and minding it. Individuality is, moreover,
cultivated and elevated by freedom to choose one's
work and do it without haste or pressure; if it be
the making of things, the habit is to make one useful
and beautiful thing well, not fifty useless and ugly
things badly. Mr. Morris omits to mention what would
happen if anyone should show an irresistible propen
sity for making articles of smooth, clear glass or
fine porcelain, but takes it for granted that such de
pravity of taste is impossible. His persistent ad
vocacy of his decoration whims is somewhat puerile and
ludicrous, but, on the whole, his commune is so healthy,
so happy, so beautiful that persons of sense ought to
be willing to have it come right away, accepting the
wearing of embroidered rags and the use of rough pot
tery and bubbly glass without a murmur, regarding
them as essential to the perpetual "peace and rest,
and cleanness and smiling good will."
J. W. Mackail, who wrote the first and still the
principal biography of Morris, had surprisingly little to
say about News from Nowhere.
The romance itself— if it would not be more correct
to speak of it as a pastoral— is of such beauty as
may readily win indulgence for its artificiality. A
pastoral, whether it places its golden age in the
past or the future, is by nature of the case artifi
cial, and perhaps so much so, though not so obviously,
as when it boldly plants itself in the present. . . .
Indeed a merely materialist Earth;ly Paradise was
always a thing Morris regarded with a feeling little
removed from disgust. That ideal organization of
life in which the names of rich and poor should dis
appear, together with the things themselves, in a
common social being, was in itself to him a mere
body, of which art, as the single high source of
214
pleasure, was the informing soul. (Mackail, II, 243-
244)
These remarks, in contrast to the full treatment that
he gave to Morris's works in Norse and in G-reek materials,
indicated rather clearly that he respected more highly
Morris's works about literature in the great traditions
than he did such works as A Dream of John Ball, News from
Nowhere, and most of the other pro-Socialist works.
Alfred Noyes, in his Morris volume in the English Men
of Letters series, registered more than disappointment at
the society which Morris had depicted in News from Nowhere.
Like Gary he did not approve of the emphasis on sensuous
ness or of Morris's unstructured society, however happy
the people may have been there. He did not find the book
realistic and thought that a person like Morris who worked
so hard himself would demand more labor of the people in
his ideal state. He did not try to find things that he
could like, for he found objectionable any world that did
not have anything to fight for and was not bothered with
problems of right and wrong.
The predominance which Morris gives throughout the
book to the transient pleasure of the senses is the
rock upon which the goodwill of many of the best
kinds of thoughtful people must inevitably split,
when reading News from Nowhere. There is not a sin
gle instance in the book where old age in a woman is
tolerated. We presume that the old women in his
Arcadia were all smothered when their first wrinkle
appeared; since all the old men are surrounded by
beautiful young girls, always very lightly clad, and
ready to kiss and have their smooth arms stroked and
so forth. Even the gang of road-menders had a bevy
215
of lightly-clad damsels lying on the grass beside
them in delicious attitudes. It would be farcical if
it were not for the high aims and glorious ideals
which seem doomed to be hampered by this cancer in
the throat of socialism— this curse of a petty and
ludicrously superficial trifling with complex sex
matters, which provides the enemies of progress with
a weapon forged in the strongest fires of human na
ture, a weapon far more invincible than the Wrath of
Sigurd. Morris's error here is precisely that of
which we have spoken before. Just as, without know
ing it, he would abolish the seasons, and dissolve
the organisation of a steamboat, so he would dissi
pate all the higher elaborations of life, its loyal
ties, its chivalries, its memories, its homes, into
a homogeneous sensuous mist. There could be no hell
like it— this world where hardly anything matters any
more, except superficial sense-pleasure; where there
is nothing to fight for, no right and no wrong, no
black and no white; a glittering plain, a world with
out form and void, because it is drawn in gold upon
gold and you cannot even see its outlines.28
29
Anna A. von Helmholtz-Phelan's study of Morris's
ideal society revealed the same joy in his vision that
Morris seemed to feel. She sympathized with his hopes
for a society that found pleasure in labor, created beau
ty, respected social equality, and reveled in freedom of
the individual will. Mrs. von Helmholtz-Phelan defended
what she called Morris's "socialistic ideas," although
she found distasteful the freedom of sexual relations in
Nowhere. She defended him specifically from the attack
by Maurice Hewlett in the National Review (XVII, 818) and
reminded us that actually Morris would retain "the bless-
28William Morris (London, 1908), pp. 134-155.
2^The Social Philosophy of William Morris (Durham,
1927).
216
ings which the system of competition has conferred upon
man.1 1 She saw, too, that Morris was pleading first of all
for the lives of men rather than for a little more beauty
in their lives, that "material growth must precede moral
growth," that Morris was deeply concerned about the spiri
tual lives of the inhabitants of Nowhere, who had faith
in a "religion of humanity."
Morris’s Utopia, as was inevitable, provided crit
ics with deadly ammunition against socialistic ideas
and Morris's exposition of them. The makers of ideal
societies always go astray, it seems, because they
endeavor to treat complex matters in an absurdly sim
ple manner. Morris’s treatment of the sex problem in
News from Nowhere is a shining example of the usual
error. The difficulty is that the idealist who writes
the Utopia can have no more than a bird's eye view of
his state, while the critics have infinitely minute
views of the present society. Some points are sure
to be slighted in the building of the fancy picture.
The principle may be right in every way, but the
method of applying it may be wholly wrong and con
fusing. This is glaringly the case with Morris’s
Utopia. Hence the justness from one angle of such a
criticism, for example, as that which Mr. Maurice Hew
lett makes on News from Nowhere. In the first place,
Mr. Hewlett objects because the twenty-third century
is followed by the fourteenth,— because the Utopia
has been made up of "rejuvenated relics." This, of
course, is only a half-truth. The mediaeval atmos-
here in Morris’s story is after all no more than an
atmosphere. Its introduction is without doubt to be
explained on the ground that building imaginary so
cieties is always more or less subjective proceeding.
That Morris was a passionate admirer of the Middle
Ages has been sufficiently emphasized. He was be
sides an artist with an artist's demands and art
ist;’ Sapoint of view, although these facts should not
prejudice any fair-minded person. Morris'sucritics
are prone to forget that he would retain all of the
blessings which the system of competition has con
ferred upon man and add to them art and beauty.
(pp. 181-182)
Mr. Hewlett and other critics who find too much of
217
material happiness in News from Nowhere forget that
before men can renounce^ they must first be men; they
must not be degraded animals fighting in misery and
squalor for the wherewithal to satisfy the cravings
of hunger, day after day and year after year, life
meaning nothing else but work hardly got, and bread
eaten amid tears and degradation. Was it not Aris
totle who said, "It is needful first to have a main
tenance, and then to practise virtue?" Surely his
tory teaches that man cannot be raised morally or in
tellectually to any perceptible degree until he has
first been placed on a sound physical basis of exis
tence. Much as he loved beauty, Morris was pleading
for the lives of men, not merely for the creation of
a little more beauty in the world except as it stood
for increased life. He saw that the true cause of
poverty is industrial and that therefore the remedy
must also be industrial. Material growth must pre
cede moral growth. Individuals cannot, however much
they are willing to renounce, raise the moral tone
of society as a whole. The most rigid introspection
accompanied by the severest asceticism is of no
avail unless the social conditions are such as to
raise the moral tone of the whole people. The spir
itual life of a people has some dependence upon the
material conditions in which that people live. No
doubt Morris was led into many absurd little by
paths in his attempt to create a picture of ideal
society; but he certainly did not altogether disdain
the spiritual life of men when he pleaded for art,
or for Socialism in order that we might have art, or
when he built up a beautiful Nowhere in which all
were interested in life; where all were happy in
their work. "Love thy neighbor as thyself," the re
ligion of humanity, if truly practised, might, it
must be remembered, demand as much education and re
nunciation as the severest faith, (p. 183)
A note in a lighter vein by G. B. Shaw, who as a
young man attended Socialist meetings at Morris’s Hammer
smith home, pointed out that he found the nineteenth-
century denouncers of Capitalism more exciting to read
than the "economists and writers on political science."
His comment on News from Nowhere was noteworthy, as was
his general attitude, which followed the pattern of
j
218
approval that Mrs. von Helmholtz-Phelan set forth the
year before Shaw wrote this paragraph.
If you read Sociology, not for information but
for entertainment (small blame to youl), you will
find that the nineteenth-century poets and prophets
who denounced the wickedness of our Capitalism ex
actly as the Hebrew prophets denounced the Capital
ism of their time, are much more exciting to read
than the economists and writers on political science
who worked out the economic theory and political re
quirements of Socialism. Carlyle’s Past and Present
and Shooting Niagara, Ruskin’s Ethics of the Dust
and Pors Clavigera, William Morris’s News from No
where (the best of all the Utopias), Dickend's Hard
limes and Little Dorrit, are notable examples:
Ruskin in particular leaving all the professed So
cialists, even Karl Marx, miles behind in force of
invective. Lenin’s criticisms of modern society
seem like the platitudes of a rural dean in compar
ison. Lenin wisely reserved his most blighting in
vectives for his own mistakes.30
Paul Bloomfield's William Morris (London, 1934),
written as a commendation to Morris's memory on the cen
tenary of his birth, continued the pattern of approval
that seemed to start with Mrs. von Helmholtz-Phelan.
Probably no one would argue that Bloomfield's book was a
major contribution to the scholarship in print on Morris,
but neither would anyone doubt that Mr. Bloomfield had
read Morris sympathetically and revealed many virtues in
Morris's happy state that his denigrators did not or
would not see.
In the quotations from Bloomfield that follow, the
author agreed that, given the Nowhere that Morris
30
The Intelligent Woman* s G-uide to Socialism and
Capitalism (Hew York, 1928), p. 469.
219
envisioned, its people would be happy, for they would he
encouraged to create artistically in their leisure time;
without money and with a completely fair attitude toward
the responsibilities of sharing the labor they would be
honest. He thought that the ideals that Morris had sug
gested in News from Nowhere would make men happy in a
society that practiced them.
There is this distinction between him and nearly
all the other Utopians, that he did not set exagger
ated hopes on Knowledge and Power. He believed in
Brotherly Love, and that people would be happy and
virtuous and beautiful if they had interesting work
to do, and were all something of artists, and could
be honest about their personal relations. Knowledge
— there is no Utopia in which children have fewer
lessons than in Nowhere. Power— there was no statue
put up, where Morris’s writ ran, to the inventor of
dynamite, (p. 284)
At last a proper balance of labour and leisure
will have been attained. The bedsteads will be art,
and they will be work; they will be a hobby that
matters. Morris had seen that the false conception
of leisure as good for anything except work had risen
through the interposition into human affairs of gold
— money— wages. It is the anxieties and oppressions
connected with earning a living that have made work
seem to so many people necessarily odious. Morris,
looking far ahead (not as far as Isaiah, seeing the
lion lie down with the lamb), understood that leisure
is not to be regarded as happy when it is a removal
from the characteristic needs, activities, and
rhythms of the world. Leisure of that sort can only
be compared with a suburban villa, with a drive
flanked by rhododendrons, an ornamental garden, but
no bean rows, set down incongruously among the fields
and orchards, and seeming to feel awkward, and rather
superior, among its neighbours, the cottages and
barns and the unaffected old manor-house. Leisure as
irrelevance, leisure as an opportunity for going in
cessantly to hear oratorios, did not seem a blessing
to Morris. But there are always a few people who
really care for a purely contemplative life. There
is nothing in Morris's Utopia to prevent them from
220
meditating for as long as they like, and without fear
of finding themselves destitute because they have not
got a regular job. (pp. 286-287)
Bloomfield was obviously affected by Morris’s utopian
vision and hoped that some day people would live as Morris
said they did in Nowhere. Bloomfield hoped for a better
humanity in the future than he (and Morris) had known.
News from Nowhere breathes a wonderful humanity.
In tliis respect no other Utopia compares with it. It
is not, of course, a book about how to make the world
better. It is a picture of the world made better.
It is a revelation of human personality! (p* 289)
The paragraph that follows was written by Dorothy
31
Hoare in 1937. Although her statement did not discuss
any single one of Morris’s characteristics of his ideal
human society, she used a phrase, "a kind of perfection,”
that summed up what Morris had in mind, she assumed, when
he wrote News from Nowhere. Earlier critics (specifically
those who wrote before World War I) had used such terms
as "insane,” "stupid," and "impossible" when describing
exactly the same work in which Miss Hoare found a kind of
perfection, the condition that a writer (Morris or any
other) would try to create in writing a "utopian romance."
Seldom does one see the full name of the work that
is usually called simply News from Nowhere. Morris called
it News from Nowhere; or an Epoch of Rest: Being some
31
The Works of Morris and of Yeats in Relation to
Early Saga Literature (Cambridge).
32
Chapters from a Utopian Romance.
221
It is a curious thing, the blending of dream and
reality which comes of its own accord, without forc
ing or artificiality, in Morris' later work. In the
pleasantness of reverie, in the discursive, leisure
ly, long drawn out movement from point to point in
the tale, reality enters. When he is dealing with
the mature feelings of men, or with heroic theme, or
with the tragic outcome of strong passions and con
flict of wills, he does not succeed, partly, one may
say, because he will not permit himself to suffer
imaginatively, possibly from other reasons. At any
rate, when he does not attempt things that are beyond
his compass, when he lets himself wander in fancy
over his beloved English country with its dusty white
ness, its blossoming hedgerows, its glittering April
freshness and the soft covert of its little copses
and sheltered dales, accompanied by the dreaming fig
ures of folk-tale, he achieves a kind of perfection,
a sort of fragrant sweetness and lingering air, as of
a half-plaintive easy folk-tune, which is quite indi
vidual and characteristic of no other writer. (Hoare,
pp. 48-49)
Margaret R. G-rennan's William Morris, Medievalist and
Revolutionary (New York, 1945), in its brief references
to News from Nowhere, discussed three characteristics of
Morris's ideal society: social equality, the successful
decentralization of government, and man's joy in labor.
She, too, continued the stream of approval of Morris's
utopia.
News from Nowhere is the serious theme of the
socialist propaganda transposed into an imaginative
key, and even more clearly than in the other romances,
we can see what Morris thought good for man. The
first principle of this new world is equality— equal
ity of condition, that is, for Morris conceded will
ingly that "it is no more possible that men should
be equal in capacity or desires or temperament than
that they should be equal in stature or in weight."
•^Collected Works, XVI, 1.
222
But equality has not been purchased at the price of
dull uniformity. There is variety both in people and
in places and even eccentricity has not yet vanished.
There is room for the Dickensian Hr. Boffin who. writes
reactionary novels and for the grumbler, Ellen's grand
father, a persistent praiser of times past, who be
lieves the secret zest in life to be found in the en
ergies released by the competitive system. It is a
world in which decentralization has been carried to
an extreme and government has almost reached the auto
matic state. And yet it is not an anarchist paradise,
for no matter how closely Morris skirted the anarchist
position, he was always careful to make it clear he
never supported it, both by direct rebuttal in the
pages of Commonweal and indirectly and humourously in
the romance through Hammond's discussion of majority
rule and democratic procedure. It is a world where
joy in labour has been rediscovered and art has lost
its name since it is merely the reflection of that
joy. The food men eat, the houses they live in, the
clothes they wear, the earth they till— from these
they draw their pleasure and their life, and whatever
they have beyond and above these, at least this much
is secured to them. (pp. 150-151)
Grennan pointed out exactly why Morris's prose ro
mances considered here have been more popular than his
lectures:
It is not without significance that the account of
the Great Change in Hews from Nowhere is perhaps less
vividly conceived than the sections treating of the
ideal society already realized. Morris was always
stronger in picturing the End than in prescribing the
means, believing as he did that men would take the
necessary steps once they really apprehended the goal.
Convince the majority of the desirability of socialism,
he felt, and they themselves will decide on the
methods best suited to their needs and times, (p. 152)
In great contrast to the amount of critical attention
that was given News from Nowhere, Morris's other romance,
A Dream of John Ball, that was also first printed in
Commonweal, received little attention from periodical re-
viewers, as a glance at any bibliography of critical
223
articles on Morris’s works will reveal. A Dream of John
Ball was neither as large nor as rich as was News from
Nowhere, and it has received comparatively little critical
attention in hooks on Morris since it was published in
book form in 1888.
The only statement that J. W. Mackail made about John
i
Ball in his two-volume biography of Morris was this:
". . .he had begun to write the flower of his prose ro
mances, the work into which he put his most exquisite de
scriptions and deepest thoughts on human life, 'The [sic]
Dream of John Ball’" (II, 168). He did not write even the
title correctly, and this is true of several other critics
who did not pay as careful attention to this work as they
might have. A case in point is Elisabeth Gary, who also
called this work The [sic^ Dream of John Ball. She seemed
to have no insight into the work and thought that "Morris
traced in John Ball's action a parallel to his own" (p.
202). She found it a dark and pessimistic work that was
more history than literature, and she made no mention of
the central theme, fellowship.
Had some of the marvelous activity that later went
toward the making of purely imaginary situations and
characters been spent upon realising for us the indi
vidual lives of more of the medieval workers and
thinkers, so vivid to Morris and so dim to us, the
result might not have been history, but it would have
been literature of a rare and felicitous type. (p. 203)
Alfred Noyes barely mentioned A Dream of John Ball
j(and misquoted the title too), and von Helmholtz-Phelan,
224
who wrote so richly about News from Nowhere, saw fit to
include only brief mention of The ["sic] Dream of John Ball
in her otherwise excellent The Social Philosophy of
William Morris. "Fellowship," she wrote, "is the word
which best sums up Morris's social teaching. In our epoch
there is not fellowship but mastership" (p. 65). She then
quoted the part of John Ball's sermon which dwelt on the
fellowship theme, but looked no further into the work.
Like Mackail she had high praise for the story of the
hedge priest, but she did not elaborate on her statement:
"The [sicj Dream of John Ball, in some ways the most
striking of his prose works, was written the next year
(1887), and published in the Commonweal" (p. 100). Actu
ally, John Ball appeared in the Commonweal between Novem
ber 13, 1886, and January 22, 1887, so most of it was
33
written in 1886. I cite these small matters to indicate
that whereas Mrs. von Helmholtz-Phelan was careful about
News from Nowhere, she, like nearly every other critic,
paid only the slightest attention to A Dream of John Ball,
and paid even less to The House of the Wolfings.
A Dream of John Ball received the careful attention
of one scholar. Margaret G-rennan, in her aforementioned
William Morris, Medievalist and Revolutionary, devoted an
entire chapter of her book to the story of the peasant
, ^
Collected Works, XVI, xxxi.
225
uprising of 1381. She looked into the sources that Morris
had used and compared what he wrote to historical accounts
of the revolt. For her, John Ball was Morris's best ac
counting of himself as a socialist, and this tale spoke
the central doctrines of his social thinking. lot only
did she recognize the importance of fellowship in Morris's
ideal society, hut she saw the importance that he attached
to absolute equality.
The gift of lively prose in the medieval supporter
of the status quo gave Morris the spur to create in
the main character of the romance the spokesman of
those ideals which seemed to him to vary in expression
at different times in the world's history, but to be
always fundamentally the same in their demand for the
decent life for the common man, a life free from fear
and free from want. John Ball's vision of the world
after the victory he hopes for is like Morris' land
of the future, after what he considered the inequal
ities and social callousness of Victorian England
have been purged. There will be no master then, but
that will be the only loss. Men will share the fields
they till, the cloth they weave, the homes they build.
"And man shall help man, and the saints in heaven
shall be glad, because men no more fear each other;
and the churl shall be ashamed, and shall hide his
churlishness till it be gone, and he be no more a
churl; and fellowship shall be established in heaven
and on the earth."
"Fellowship" indeed is always Morris' answer to
"Devil Take-the-Hindmost" and John Ball's speech at
the Gross, in which hell is defined as the place
where 'fevery man is for himself," is one long protest
in medieval terms against the principle of laissez-
faire in any age. Economically too it is not good
for man to be alone, and all the implications of the
speech are directed against the Victorian system, or
lack of it, in which the responsibility of man for
man is lost.
In the medieval sermon, as in the socialist lecture,
there is the usual emphasis on unity as the strength
of the poor; of the necessity of action, not dreams;
of the "most miserable sin" of all, forgetting their
226
own interest in a mistaken play for the favor of the
rich man whom the poor man "deemeth to be other than
he." There is the same hope: that the fellowship is
waxing stronger, "not strong to bear, but to do."
And of course the ideal of absolute equality that
John Ball preached was at the root of all Morris’
social thinking. (pp. 81-82)
Mrs. von Helmholtz-Phelan said that "fellowship" was
the word which best summed up Morris’s social teaching
(Social Philosophy, p. 158). Mrs. G-rennan said in the
above quotation that absolute equality was "at the root
of all Morris' social thinking." Whatever the distinc
tions that one can make between "thinking" and "teaching"
as they are used here, the important thing was that both
scholars pointed to two of the most important of the
ideals for which Morris worked, equality and fellowship,
both of which were demonstrated and defended in A Bream
of John Ball.
The critical attention that was given in periodicals
and books to The House of the Wolfings (1888) was of lit
tle value to this study as the following extracts will
testify. Most of the critiques in periodicals merely
summarized the story, and often this work was reviewed
along with several others, so that sometimes it was barely
mentioned in passing. Much of the criticism was superfi
cial and frequently the result of superficial and hasty
reading.
227
She anonymous reviewer in The Critic (New York)^4
reviewed Wolfings in less than one full page and spent
most of his article retelling the story, with which he was
not especially happy because he found "monotonous" Mor
ris's "modern-antique English." He did not like the com
bination of prose and verse in the tale and offered an in
teresting comment on Morris's vast studies in Norse mate
rials: "... there is at times a suspicion of the harsh
ness of the old Teutonic and Scandinavian lays which Mr.
Morris, if we may say so, has studied more than is good
for him."
•35
The Nation reviewed Wolfings along with six other
books, but in the one paragraph devoted to it praised the
artistry of the simple people who dwelled together under
one roof and decorated their hall with fine tapestries.
This review was rather unusual because it found something
to praise in the work.
36
Maurice Hewlett found The House of the Wolfings
much more to his liking than he had found News from No
where , because he discovered a more realistic human soci
ety among the Wolfings than he thought Morris had por
trayed in his Nowhere. He liked the strong, earthy
34XV, 13-14, July 13, 1889,
55LI, 195, September 4, 1890.
•^The Nineteenth Century, XXVI, 337-341, August 1889.
228
people of:
. . . Northern Europe at the time of the earliest
Roman invasion, when the Gothic communities upon the
banks of the Elbe kept their primitive institutions
of Mark, Thang and Polk-Mote unchanged; when totemism
and exogamy were still inviolate customs, and the
grim religion of Odinism maintained its hold upon the
affections and satisfied the aspirations of its be
lievers .
He admired the communal life of the people who de
fended themselves against the intrusion of Roman milita^-
rism and civilization, people who wanted to maintain their
freedom in the wildwood and practice the simple decorative
skills, like carving and weaving, that the people of No
where enjoyed. After summarizing the story, Mr. Hewlett
said:
Some intermixture of ancient and modern thought was
of course inevitable in dealing with moral motives,
but for the most part the keeping of the Gothic ideal
is admirably sustained, and the features wherein its
mental type resembled the Greek, its abiding sense of
the mastery of Pate, and bold yet not irreverent
handling of religious beliefs, are brought out with
great force.
G. E. Woodberry, in an untitled review in The
37
Atlantic, called this "one of the few contributions of
our present time to imaginative literature.'1 He, too, was
impressed with the communal life of the Markmen, "the so
cial union of the Marksmen [sic] as one people . . . their
tribal self-consciousness, as an evolutionist would say."
What Morris usually called "fellowship" Woodberry dis-
37LXV, 851-854, June 1890.
229
cussed as the governing sense of rule in the Mid-mote:
. . . the doctrine of the brotherhood of man springs
certainly from a modern feeling, or gains by it; so
that the doctrine of the brotherhood of men in races
and kindred, and their duty to society as a part of
a larger life, has seldom been so nobly and almost
triumphantly expressed.
The long review which The Athenaeum published on Sep
tember 14, 1889, was reprinted as an appendix to the first
38
American edition. At the end the anonymous reviewer
said that The House of the Wolfings was "a work whose very
excellence will prevent its being popular." Perhaps his
remark was read by other reviewers, for, although it has
been admired at a distance by such people as Mackail and
Noyes, it has never been popular with reviewers.
Two recent authors examined Wolfings carefully. The
first was Lloyd Wendell Eshleman, who wrote:
Perhaps more than any other of his distinctly liter
ary productions it bears directly upon Morris’s phir*
losophy of life and history. It is "the narrative in
prose and verse" called The House of the Wolfings, in
which is to be found some of the finest writing that
Morris ever attempted. But its chief importance lies
in its expression of all that William Morris ever
felt .regarding "the period of greatest historical
change in the world”— the transition period when the
Romans were fighting the barbarians, when Christian
ity was battling with Paganism, when the approaching
death of ancient Classical civilization was heralding
the approaching birth of European civilization.
This carefully written literary work, voluminous
as it was, meant to Morris the depiction of a barbar
ism that was not barbarous: the depiction of simple
38
William Morris, A Tale of the House of the Wolfings
and All the Kindred of the Mark, Written in Prose and in
[Verse (Boston, 1890).
230
society, loosely joined together hy social ties, each
community more or less self-sufficing, and each having
its own moot and its own council hall. To Morris it
meant the superiority of a life lived close to nature,
and the superiority of the Medieval Northern "barbar
ians" over the decadent, urbanized, cosmopolitan civi
lization of the South and East.39
Much more specific than Mr. Eshleman was Margaret
Grennan, who saw many of Morris’s ideals in the simple
life patterns of the Wolfings.
Dreaming as he did of a society in the future living
in communal simplicity, it must have been with partic
ular delight that he turned to recreating from the
facts and conjectures of his historical reading an
example of a similar life in the remote reaches of
the past. The people of Midmark hold in common the
acres, the meadows, and the wood. They share the
products of fields tilled and flocks herded by the
united effort of the kindred. The handicrafts flour
ish. The women card and spin the wool and the great
looms tell not only the stories of the Wolfings and
their gods but the joy in work freely done. At the
thing-stead the assembled folk "hallow" in the Thing,
and decide the course to be followed by the tribe in
peace and in war. At night they gather in the great
house, built "like a church of later days" and the
arche-type of the Communal Hall of Morris’ Utopian
Future. There is peace and plenty— satisfying work
during the long day and simple pleasure at its end.
(Grennan, pp. 109-110)
The great joy among the Wolfings stemmed from their
all being members of a simple society of equals. They
lived, worked, and played together, and they wanted to
preserve their communal life in the forest forever.
Mr. E. P. Thompson made the suggestion that Morris
wrote The House of the Wolfings "to illustrate the melting
•^A Victorian Rebel; The life of William Morris (New
|York, 1940), p. 279. ' : :
i___________________________________ — ---------------------------------------------
231
of the individual into the society of the tribes." He
found this book to be a "rediscovery of that social sense
which the Victorian 'self-help* had brought near to ex
tinction everywhere except in the centres of working-
class life" (pp. 599-600).
I now set down some of my opinions about Morris's
critics.
It was unfortunate that so many of Morris's early
critics did not understand him; they often did not under
stand his program because they did not read him thor
oughly, or perhaps there was a desire to disagree with him
because they were frequently anti-Socialist, and he was a
revolutionary Socialist, as we see in his Manifesto of the
Socialist League.^ Some of the critics who knew Morris
and who were close to him as friends or as relatives were
loath to mention his alliance with Socialist causes and so
avoided mentioning his ideals, which were parts of a pro
gram for revolutionary change. Since World War I the peo
ple who have written about Morris's social programs have
read him carefully, have seen him in better perspective
than the early writers did, and so have, as did Anna A.
von Helmholtz-Phelan and E. P. Thompson, come to agree
with him more than did his earliest critics. It is easier
to agree with Morris today than it was in the nineteenth
^See Appendix.
232
century because the British and American societies have in
this century become increasingly socialistic; certainly we
are closer to a welfare state where the material needs of
common people are better satisfied than they were in Mor
ris’ s day.
Many of the critics disagreed with Morris on very
small matters that had little to do with his broad program
of change. They quibbled about Morris's use of appropri
ate language or about the looseness of morality in his
ideal societies when they did not understand the morality
in which he believed.
Many of the critics were unwilling to accept the pos
sibility of the ideal world that Morris desired, for they
were afraid of sudden change, and Morris insisted that
the change would have to come about by the slow, gradual,
and non-violent revolt of the working people. His critics
wanted Morris to show each step of the way toward an ideal
state, and he nowhere attempted to show the progress
toward his Utopia. The critics were more realistic than
'Morris was about the possibility of social changes, and
few of them were willing to see far into the future, as he
suggested they must, when after the revolt against a
slave-master, capitalistic system men would be happy, Mor
ris contended, in a state like the one which he described
in News from Nowhere. Criticism on this work alone has
indicated thata change of opinion about the kind of ideal
233
society that Morris desired has come about in the last
forty years.
Some critics who would not take seriously Morris’s
ideas about a better state disagreed with his plans for
an ideal state, for example, Morris suggested that before
his ideal state could come into existence man himself
would have to improve morally, and he elaborated greatly
on how this would be possible with a freeing of the work
ers from a slave system so that they really enjoyed social
equality. But here Morris was frequently criticized for
believing that man was perfectible. This Morris did be
lieve, but few of his critics agreed on this point. Some
thought that society could never improve so long as man
stayed as imperfect as he had always been; Morris believed
that man could be made better morally and that society
would therefore improve. His critics continued to dis
agree that the moral improvement of man was possible even
after years of elaboration on Morris's part as to how the
improvement was possible. They disagreed, too, that work
could ever be a pleasure, but Morris absolutely insisted
that if people were not forced to produce for a profit
system and could have the pleasure of artistic creativity
in beautiful surroundings they would enjoy their work.
Edith Simcox, for instance, did not find that work had
been a pleasureful experience, but she hoped that some day
it might be. i
234
One early review (in the Review of Reviews for June,
1891) did agree with Morris on most points in his program
for change. It recognized that if men were happy in their
work they would probably be healthy, that health and hap
piness went together. Morris argued through all his lec
tures that no one ideal was possible without most of the
others, that they all must work together and when they
did the whole moral tone of society would be improved.
This review saw the importance of Morris's argument.
Morris was frequently criticized for placing too much
emphasis on the physical rather than on the spiritual side
of life.Vi Many of Morris's contemporaries were shocked at
the frank enjoyment of sensual pleasure, especially of
seeing and touching the human body, that the people in his
Nowhere experienced. Morris did love the flesh, but to
say that he was not interested in the spiritual was not to
have read him thoroughly. He respected a religion of hu
manity and suggested the possibility of a world whose
spiritual level was so high above that known to his con
temporaries that nineteenth-century spirituality would be
below their concern, forgotten in the past. It was diffi
cult for Morris's critics to understand that he believed
in a humanity that was spiritually far above the level of
the people around him.
Morris's desire that the institutions that inhibited
man be destroyed was a stumbling block for many of his
235
critics. Morris thought that man's institutions had heen
invented to curb and to control him and that they pre
vented him from being a natural man. Morris would not
dissolve the institutions until man and society had im
proved. His critics thought that he would destroy man's
institutions (like Parliament) and then try to build a
true society out of the anarchy that resulted. Morris
would improve men, and he believed that as they improved
the moral level of society would improve, and the old in
stitutions would gradually dissolve and not be replaced
in the interdependent, moral society of which he dreamed.
That the people of his Howhere were unsophisticated,
were not intellectual, were not scholars we must agree,
but, while Morris was called "unintellectual" by Douglas
Bush, perhaps because he did not engage in philosophical
problems about the past, Morris was a very keen student
of history, as Margaret G-rennan attested. He wanted the
simple life, and he wanted his people to be trained in the
simple, everyday things; acquiring a disciplined knowledge
of the past might involve organizing an institution of
learning, and Morris thought that kind of knowledge not
worth the price. It was enough to live in his world in
the present.
Some critics were unhappy that Morris was so critical
of nearly everything in his own day: the way in which
people lived, and worked, and worshiped, and thought, and
256
were organized. Morris was unhappy with all the condi
tions of his society; that was exactly why he wanted to
hring about a change. Most of his critics seemed content
to maintain the status quo.
Mackail and May Morris, disappointingly, did not lock
very intently into Morris's hopes for an ideal world.
Perhaps this was because they did not want to. Those
critics who read his plans for a better world discovered
something rich indeed. If I were to choose the two crit
ics who put Morris's dreams into the best light they would
be Anna A. von Helmholtz-Phelan and Margaret G-rennan.
E. P. Thompson studied Morris more intently than did these
ladies, but with the intention of showing the importance
of Marxian thinking in him. This he did; however, his
slanted approach weakened his whole, but otherwise excel
lent, book.
As examples of varieties of reactions to one of Mor
ris's works, I choose words and a phrase from four differ
ent critics who wrote about News from Nowhere. One called
it "stupid," another "insane," a third "impossible," and
a fourth "a kind of perfection." Morris, and I think I
would agree with him, would probably call it the hope for
a world that might be possible if he could get men and
women really to practice the Golden Rule.
Although some of the critics admired Morris's desire
for a world in which complete social equality existed,_____
237
none of them .thought his desire possible. Given the na
ture of man as we know it today, I would have to agree,
but Morris knew that to realize his dreams he had to
change men, that they had to want to change themselves.
He was not specific in laying down a program whereby he
could change men. The end, not the means, was important
to him. He was accused of being an impractical idle
i
dreamer because he could not lay down a pattern for the
change. His only defense was that if men saw the vision
(and his task was to show it to them) they would find the
means. But Morris had to change men, he said, before they
could find the means.
If all men had the leisure to be creatively artistic
would they be actively creative, and would they be happy
in their creativity? Many critics asked this question and
made clear that many people had no talent for creativity,
and they contended that even if all men had artistic tal
ents and practiced their arts that the .moral tone would .
not be raised and people would not necessarily be happy.
Morris would reply.that he had actually taken boys from
the streets and made them minor artists in his shops,, and
that when his workmen lived according to the plan of the
earthly paradise that he tried to create in his Merton Ab-
bey works they were happy.
I should like now to discuss some of my own opinions
about Morris's ideal society. That man should be free to
258
work at tasks which he enjoyed, that he should he freed
from his chief labors long enough to have leisure to pur-
sue an avocation or to think, that he should be free to
cultivate his individual will, that he should be free from
the tyranny of domination, that he should be free to seek
pleasure and happiness— with none of these do I disagree.
But to be free of all institutions, to be free to lead an
unfettered animal life, to be free of all responsibilities
except to practice the Golden Rule— with these freedoms I
cannot agree, for having these last three freedoms might
well destroy those freedoms first mentioned. Pew men
would want to live in a society that did not have laws and
institutions that limited men for the good of society.
The freedoms that Morris advocated would soon produce an
archy and, I am afraid, chaos.
I agree with Morris's wanting a society in which all
people had opportunities for pleasureful work in beautiful
surroundings, but his ideal is unrealistic. Some jobs
like coal mining and sewer cleaning are unpleasant tasks,
and some people will have to do them if society is to have
coal and if sewage is to be kept out of the streets. A
realist knows that living involves the performing of many
unpleasant tasks, some of them in unpleasant places, but
Morris tried to escape from this realistic attitude. Mor
ris's solution for getting an unpleasant job done was to
|have the people share it, thus mitigating the unpleasant-
259
ness, or else to forget it.
That people should have the opportunity to partici
pate in creative artistry nearly everyone would agree,
hut my experience tells me that most people are not crea
tively artistic and would spend their leisure at the cine
ma, as Mr. Cockerell said, or would be ’ 'criminally idle”
with their leisure hours. Again Morris was unrealistic in
thinking that all people would want the opportunity to be
artistic and creative. He himself was perhaps the most
versatile creative artist in the nineteenth century, but
all men are not William Morris. He frequently made the
naive mistake of thinking that if he enjoyed something all
people would.
To the degree that Morris wanted decentralization of
government, I think he was also unrealistic. I am fright
ened at the present increases of governmental control
(such as those in our farm subsidies programs), but to de
centralize government to the point that a few neighbors
could get together and solve all their problems would be
to destroy the long tradition of government that man has
invented for the good of his societies and to forget that
man's responsibilities are national and international.
Hid Morris really think that the population in England and
in the world would not increase? If he could have guessed
that the population of Great Britain would be nearly
53*000,000 in 1961 and that the population density would
240
be 562 per square mile (according to the 1962 edition of
Collier’s Encyclopedia, XI, 542) would he have dared to
hope for the almost complete decentralization of govern
ment in about the year 2100 when G-reat Britain may have a
population in excess of 150,000,000? Did Morris think
that "free and unfettered animal life" would reduce the
population? As population increases so, normally, does
the need for government. But Morris's reading of history
did not seem to indicate this to him.
As to Morris's hope that the products of labor would
substitute for money as the bases of exchange, I can only
say every civilization has (usually very early in its de
velopment) invented some kind of money. In an undeveloped
society men might trade fish for coconuts, but Morris was
not talking about a savage society. He wanted the prod
ucts of men's hands to be the bases for exchange in a
highly sophisticated society where all people were crea
tive artists. Did he believe that a Michelangelo would
take time from his sculpturing to raise lambs which he
would trade for marble?
If men were changed as Morris hoped that they would
be so that their society were of a higher spiritual nature
than he found in his society, and if no one owned property
or had any money, then we might expect that we could have
something close to the honesty in men that Morris desired.
Importantly, none of these ideals could exist indepen-
241
dently, we know. Given Morris’s ideal society, perhaps
men would he honest, and they would have good health and
be happy too. Then they could live communally in fellow
ship and enjoy their rural existence; then they would be
living in his ideal human society. But to be a part of
his better state, each person would have to be the subli
mated individual that Morris envisioned. I would like to
think that such a society as Morris desired were possible,
but Morris's ideal state demanded that men be changed more
than I can honestly believe that men can be changed.
I would like to mention briefly some of the things
that Morris omitted in any considerations of a better so
ciety. Morris insisted that he looked forward to the
state that he described, not backward. How can one be
convinced of this when he mentioned none of the following?
Nowhere did he consider astronomy, photography, teleg
raphy, electricity, steam power, or the telephone. All of
these were known and used in London by 1881. He mentioned
no railroad or ocean transportation, insurance, pensions,
hospitals, and scientific laboratories. No city needed
policemen or fire departments, and no country needed an
army or a navy. No foreign relations existed. In all
the works read for this study Morris mentioned only one
foreign country, the United States, which the dwellers in
Nowhere remembered as a "stinking dust heap" after its
collapse in the twentieth century. His ideal society was
242
insularly happy without feeling the need for exploration
of the earth outside England; while the children of No
where learned foreign languages, Morris gave no reason why
they should. Apparently Morris thought that when the
ideal state flourished in England it would be character
istic of all the world. Morris proved how far unrealistic
idealism could be carried.
I would like to quote, once more, a realistic admirer
of Morris, Holbrook Jackson, who was moved by Morris's
dream, but who knew, as Morris did not, the unchanging
nature of man.
He dreamed of a Utopia where work is so joyfully per
formed that people fear lest there may not be enough
of it to go around. . . . the genial Communism that
he preached, with its democracy, fellowship, handi
craft and freedom, has become autocracy, with mechan
ization and standardization of men and materials as
its ideals.
William Morris will be remembered today as the
most splendid failure of the nineteenth century.
Many fail because they are wrong. Morris failed be
cause he was right. He had the courage to make no
compromise with the social system he condemned. He
believed that men must live in fellowship and have
joy in their work or they will perish, and until we
have found a working substitute for that doctrine
the failure of Morris can only be relative, and,
perhaps, temporary.41
-,o^William Morris on Art and Socialism (London, 1947),
P_i i ^ . . . • ... ........................
SUMMARY
I come now to the summary of this study of Morris’s
concept of the ideal human society. The list of fourteen
characteristics of his ideal society is drawn from twenty-
six lectures, A Dream of John Ball, News from Nowhere, and
The House of the Wolfings. The lectures, for the most
part, urged the working people and the creative artists to
change their society for the betterment of the individual;
this betterment, he believed, would raise the level of all
humanity and allow the enslaved workers to have the true
richness of human existence.
The prose romances considered here presented pictures
of ideal human societies at three different periods in
history. The House of the Wolfings depicted the simple,
ideal life of a Gothic tribe about the fourth century,
A Dream of John Ball presented a revolutionary situation
in fourteenth-century Kent, and News from Nowhere gave a
picture of late twenty-first century England.
The fourteen characteristics have been discussed at
the ends of Chapters I, II, and III, A brief recapitula
tion here may help to show how these characteristics fit
into something of a unified whole. Morris did not show
us a society which had all fourteen characteristics, and
______________________________ 243_____________________________!
244
several of the characteristics show up in all of the prose
romances and in many of the lectures. I shall attempt to
show here a brief composite picture of Morris’s ideal hu
man society.
Freedom, more than anything else, meant the opportu-,
nity to work at the various tasks which most pleased an
individual. Morris believed that no man was happy when
idle, but neither could he be happy when he was enslaved;
he needed to be free to work at the tasks which gave him
the most pleasure.
Man also needed "a free and unfettered animal life,”
Morris insisted, and he believed that no institution
should limit a person or prevent his being what his nat
ural healthy passions demanded. All people should be free
to move about and live where they could best contribute to
the welfare of themselves and of the society of which they
were a part. Each person needed leisure so that he could
be as creative as he desired to be, and he should, by con
tributing his fair share of work to his community, be
freed from fear of want or deprivation. Each person
should be free to cultivate his individual self, free to
follow the bents of his talents, and free from the domi
nation of any man or any group of men.
Pleasureful work in beautiful surroundings Morris
considered the birthright of every individual. Believing
that every man wanted to be useful, Morris said that man
245
would be useful if he enjoyed his work and did it away
from everything that he considered ugly. No man could
work happily as a slave for a master who used a man’s only
product, his labor, to become wealthy himself. Man needed
to be free to enjoy his work. Here two of Morris's ideals
were joined into one.
Participation in creative artistry was something that
Morris believed all men desired. All people had artistic
talents, he thought, but the slave system of his day kept
most individuals from doing anything but working. If a
man could have leisure and be in a beautiful place, Morris
believed that he would reflect the natural beauty around
him by becoming artistically creative. Society had an
obligation not to overproduce anything so that all men,
freed from unnecessary work, would have the opportunities
of enjoying their inherent talents, no matter how simple
the talents. Art, Morris believed, would awaken all peo
ple to the fullness of life.
Social equality was one of the ideals most frequently
stressed and was discussed in most of the lectures and in
all of the prose romances. Morris demanded absolute so
cial equality, which meant, more than anything else, the
elimination of property ownership and a monetary system
so that no person could store wealth and thus control any
other man. Since no one could control anyone else all mer
were dependent on all others in their society for their j
246
individual well-being.
So far all the ideals fit into a unified pattern
around the free workman who has the leisure to be creative
among his social equals, all of whom depend on one another
for their very existences.
Decentralization of government followed upon social
equality for Morris, because if all men were genuinely
equal they would depend on one another as the members of
a tribe do and would need no government at all. Keep all
men busy, creative, and equal, Morris suggested, and no
government would be needed. Man, Morris said, wanted to
solve his own problems, and would, in a society which had
the proper moral tone. By that he meant a society which
truly respected each individual and recognized each per
son’s right to share in all the natural richness that a
community had and all that it, as a society, could
produce.
The opportunity for universal education Morris de
sired so that all could share whatever knowledge there
was and thus develop their natural capabilities and be
come contributing members of their society. Education
was not institutionalized for Morris, and it was never to
be used for any individual’s commercial advantage over
another. This ideal Morris related often to participation
in creative artistry, because one of education's chief
tasks, for him, was to awaken man's sense of beauty so____
247
that he would want to become artistic. Art "sublimated1 '
man, he said, so that he would live a life of goodness
and virtue.
Instead of any monetary system Morris desired the use
of the products of labor as the basis for exchange among
men because he believed in the genuineness and in the
value of what a man actually produced. He could not trust
a false system, a monetary system, especially one which
made for social inequality and which instigated most
crimes among men. Every man who could work owned poten
tial riches that all other men and societies needed. Hav
ing this, why create false standards?
Good health would be a characteristic of Morris's
ideal human society once the people were freed from pover
ty and fears of all kinds. Morris never doubted that the
earth could support any number of people. Each person in
his ideal society, however, was expected to do outdoor
work and help raise some of the food for the community.
This work would help keep each person healthy.
Good health resulted from living in a society which
lived according to the aforementioned ideals. Morris was
seriously concerned about man's spiritual (what we might
call psychological) health, and he believed that if most
of the ideals that have been mentioned so far were not
followed the people of that society could not be spiri
tually healthy.
248
Honesty to be a characteristic of a society had also
to be a characteristic of the individual in that society.
Specifically, the term "honesty" meant to Morris living in
and working for a society which strove for the happiness
of each individual by providing a co-operative rather than
a competitive system of living. He thought that men would
be honest if the basis for exchange among them were the
product of their labors;.rather than money, that caused
hoarding and encouraged a profit system. An honest soci
ety was one which allowed each person to enjoy the "full
fruits of his labors" so that a man need not fear for his
livelihood.
Happiness was the characteristic of the ideal human
society that, like good health, resulted from creative
participation in a society which lived up to all the other
ideals. A happy society, like a happy person, was one
which was free, with each person engaged in pleasureful
work in beautiful surroundings, each person having enough
leisure to do something artistically creative after he had
discharged his responsibilities to the community. Social
equality helped to bring happiness to everyone in the
ideal state, which had no limiting institutions, even gov
ernment. The only law was the gentle burden of the Golden
Rule, which was not difficult to follow when each person
recognized his interdependent responsibilities to his
fellow men and when men had no money to make t h e m _______
249
dishonest. No one owned property in Morris’s ideal state,
and no one produced anything that was not needed; thus
enough food was available for all people, and happiness
obtained where man’s basic wants were satisfied.
Fellowship was life, for John Ball, and the lack of
it, death. Men needed each other to supply the basic
needs of a community, for, working together, a community
could produce the food as well as the shelter and the
clothing to supply the needs for unsophisticated people
who were dedicated to simplicity. fhe richness of friend
ship was not only highly prized but also necessary to the
well-being of each person in the community. Men worked,
sang, played, died together in the joys and struggles of
a society that recognized the importance of each person.
Rural existence provided men with those things that
the city denied, the opportunity for each person to live
healthily in the country in a relaxed atmosphere close to
the beauty of nature. Men who lived close to the soil
came to worship the earth as the real provider and did not
worship a false god like a monetary system. Working the
earth, men were free from the cares of the crowded city,
and enjoyed the social equality of a society of people who
recognized their dependence upon the soil and upon the
co-operative labors of all men who made the earth produce.
In the country, men exchanged the products of their la-
bors, and the good food that they produced kept them______
250
healthy in producing it and happy in using it.
Communal living was practiced "by segments of society
larger than a single family group when the co-operation of
a large social segment, like a tribe, was necessary for
the production of food or for defending people from their
enemies. The people lived together usually in a large
hall as if they were all one family. The Mormons who
jpracticed polygamy in the nineteenth century furnished an
example of the kind of communal living that Morris seemed
to have in mind. Of all the characteristics of the ideal
society this one was perhaps the least important, but was
mentioned often enough by Morris to demand inclusion here.
The use of artistic decoration was so characteristic
of so many of the societies that Morris described that it
cannot be eliminated as a characteristic in his ideal so-
1
|ciety. The leisure that his artistically creative people
ihad, demanded that they have some outlet for their natural
talents. Thus they enjoyed making their dwelling places
beautiful and so gave vent to their love of beauty which
they found in the world of nature around them. This ideal
combined their love of nature with their creative bents
and gave them the rich pleasure of creating, as parts of
their homes, imitations of what they found beautiful in
nature.
So many different opinions were expressed by so many
critics of Morris *s dream of an ideal society that little i
251
generalization, of course, can be made. One statement
might be made about all of them: those who read him and
tried to understand the ideal society that he had in mind
tended to agree with him, but many of the critics, espe
cially the earliest ones, disagreed with his ideas and
thought that he was expressing desires that were not prac
tical. The critics since World War I, living in a world
which is more socialistically oriented than Morris’s world
was, found many virtues in his dream for a better world
for people who wished to live together or were forced to
live together in the hind of ’ ’ honest’ ' society that he
described where social equality, the absence of a profit
motive, and practice of the Golden Rule existed.
APPENDIX
Morris's The Manifesto of the Socialist League and
selected annotations to a second edition of it are re
printed here because it is a clear prose statement of
many of the ambitions that Morris had when he joined the
Socialist League in 1885. His hopes for a better society
and his reasons for disliking the labor conditions of his
day are the same as those announced herein by members of
the Socialist League. Morris’s hopes for an improved
society, as stated in this declaration, coincide at many
points with his dreams of the ideal society. Because
Manifesto is so closely relevant to Morris's lectures
and to the three prose romances studied here, it is de
sirable that it be accessible to readers of this study.
The Manifesto is copied from E. P. Thompson's
Villiam Morris (pp. 849-857). Mr. Thompson did not list
his source.
THE MANIFESTO OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE
Written by William Morris
Adopted at the General Conference, July 5th, 1885 (With
selections from the annotations of Morris and Bax to the
Second Edition)
FELLOW CITIZENS,— We come before you as a body advocating
the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism;
252
253
that is, we seek a change in the "basis of Society— a
change which would destroy the distinctions of classes
and nationalities.
As the civilised world is at present constituted,
there are two classes of Society— the one possessing
wealth and the instruments of its production, the other
producing wealth by means of those instruments but only by
the leave and for the use of the possessing classes.
These two classes are necessarily in antagonism to
one another. The possessing class, or non-producers, can
only live as a class on the unpaid labour of the producers
— the more unpaid labour they can wring out of them, the
richer they will be; therefore the producing class— the
workers— are driven, to strive to better themselves at the
expense of the possessing class, and the conflict between
the two is ceaseless. Sometimes it takes the form of open
rebellion, sometimes of strikes, sometimes of mere wide
spread mendicancy and crime; but it is always going on in
one form or other, though,it may not always be obvious to
the thoughtless looker-on (see Uote A).
We have spoken of unpaid labour: it is necessary to
explain what that means. The sole possession of the pro
ducing class is the power of labour inherent in their
bodies; but since, as we have already said, the rich
classes possess all the instruments of labour, that is,
the land, capital, and machinery, the producers or workers
are forced to sell their sole possession, the power of la
bour, on such terms as the possessing class will grant
them.
These terms are, that after they have produced enough
to keep them in working order, and enable them to beget
children to take their places when they are worn out, the
surplus of their product shall belong to the possessors of
property, which bargain is based on the fact that every
man working in a civilised community can produce more than
be needs for his own sustenance (Note B).
This relation of the possessing class to the working
class is the essential basis of the system of producing
|for a profit, on which our modern Society is founded. The
jway in which it works is as follows. The manufacturer
produces to sell at a profit to the broker or factor, who
in his turn makes a profit out of his dealings with the
merchant, who again sells for a profit to the retailer,
who must make his profit out of the general public, aided
|by various degrees of fraud and adulteration and the ig-
jnorance of the value and quality of goods to which this
254
system has reduced the consumer.
The profit-grinding system is maintained by competi
tion, or veiled war, not only between the conflicting
classes, but also within the classes themselves: there is
always war among the workers for bare subsistence, and
among their masters, the employers and middle-men for the
share of the profit wrung out of the workers; lastly,
there is competition always, and sometimes open war, among
the nations, of the civilised world for their share of the
world-market. For now, indeed, all the rivalries of na
tions have been reduced to this one— a degrading struggle
for their share of the spoils of barbarous countries to be
used at home for the purpose of increasing the riches of
the rich and the poverty of the poor.
For, owing to the fact that goods are made primarily
to sell, and only secondarily for use, labour is wasted on
all hands; since the pursuit of profit compels the manu
facturer competing with his fellows to force his wares on
the markets by means of their cheapness, whether there is
any real demand for them or not. In the words of the Com
munist manifesto of 1847:
"Cheap goods are their artillery for battering
down Chinese walls and for overcoming the obstinate
hatred entertained against foreigners by semi-civis
lised nations: under penalty of ruin the Bourgeoisie
compel by competition the universal adoption of their
system of production; they force all nations to ac
cept what is called civilisation— to become bourgeois
— and thus the middle-class shapes the world after
its own image."
Moreover, the whole method of distribution under this
system is full of waste; for it employs whole armies of
clerks, travellers, shopmen, advertisers, and what not,
merely for the sake of shifting money from one person's
pocket to another's; and this waste in production and
waste in distribution, added to the maintenance of the
useless lives of the possessing and non-producing class,
must all be paid for out of the products of the workers,
and is a ceaseless burden on their lives.
Therefore the necessary results of this so-called
civilisation are only too obvious in the lives of its
slaves, the working-class— in the anxiety and want of lei
sure amidst which they toil, in the squalor and wretched
ness in those parts of our great towns where they dwell;
in the degradation of their bodies, their wretched health,
and the shortness of their lives; in the terrible
255
brutality so common among them, and which is indeed hut
the reflection of the cynical selfishness found among the
well-to-do classes, a brutality as hideous as the other;
and lastly, in the crowd of criminals who are as much
manufacturers of our commercial system as the cheap and
nasty wares which are made at once for the consumption and
the enslavement of the poor.
What remedy, then, do we propose for this failure of
our civilisation, which is now admitted by almost all
thoughtful people?
We have already shown that the workers, although they
produce all the wealth of society, have no control over
its production or distribution: the people, who are the
only really organic part of society, are treated as a mere
appendage to capital— as a part of its machinery. This
must be altered from the foundation: the land, the capi
tal, the machinery, factories, workshops, stores, means of
transit, mines, banking, all means of production and dis
tribution of wealth, must be declared and treated as the
common property of all. Every man will then receive the
full value of his labour, without deduction for the profit
of a master, and as all will have to work, and the waste
now incurred by the pursuit of profit will be at an end,
the amount of labour necessary for every individual to
perform in order to carry on the essential work of the
world will be reduced to something like two or three hours
daily; so that every one will have abundant leisure for
following intellectual and other pursuits congenial to his
nature (Note C).
This change in the method of production and distribu
tion would enable every one to live decently, and free
from the sordid anxieties for daily livelihood which at
present weigh so heavily on the greatest part of mankind
(Note D).
But, moreover, men's social and moral relations would
be seriously modified by this gain of economical freedom,
and by the collapse of the superstitions, moral and other,
which necessarily accompany a state of economical slavery:
the test of duty would now rest on the fulfilment of clear
and well-defined obligations to the community rather than
on the moulding of the individual character and actions to
some preconceived standard outside social responsibilities
(Note E).
Our modern bourgeois property-marriage, maintained as
it is by its necessary complement, universal venal prosti
tution, would give place to kindly and human relations____
256
between the sexes (Note P).
Education freed from the trammels of commercialism on
the one hand and superstition on the other, would become a
reasonable drawing out of men's varied faculties in order
to fit them for a life of social intercourse and happi
ness; for mere work would no longer be proposed as the end
of life, but happiness for each and all.
Only by such fundamental changes in the life of man,
or by the transformation of Civilisation into Socialism,
can those miseries of the world before-mentioned be
amended (Note G).
As to mere politics, Absolutism, Constitutionalism,
Republicanism, have all been tried in our day and under •
our present social system, and all have alike failed in
dealing with the real evils of life.
Nor, on the other hand, will certain incomplete
schemes of social reform now before the public solve the
question.
Co-operation so-called— that is, competitive co-oper
ation for profit— would merely increase the number of
small joint-stock capitalists, under the mask of creating
an aristocracy of labour, while it would intensify the
severity of labour by its temptations to overwork (Note H).
Nationalisation of the land alone, which many earnest
and sincere persons are now preaching, would be useless
so long as labour was subject to the fleecing of surplus
value inevitable under the Capitalist system (Note I).
No better solution would be that State Socialism, :>by
whatever name it may be called, whose aim it would be to
make concessions to the working class while leaving the
present system of capital and wages still in operation:
no number of merely administrative changes, until the
workers are in possession of all political power, would
make any real approach to Socialism (Note J).
The Socialist League therefore aims at the realisa
tion of complete Revolutionary Socialism, and well knows
that this can never happen in any one country without the
help of the workers of all civilisation. Por us neither
geographical boundaries, political history, race, nor
creed makes rivals or enemies; for us there are no nations
but only varied masses of workers and friends, whose mu
tual sympathies are checked or perverted by groups of mas
ters and fleecers whose interest it is to stir up
257
rivalries and hatreds between the dwellers in different
lands.
It is clear that for all these oppressed and cheated
masses of workers and their masters a great change is pre
paring: the dominant classes are uneasy, anxious, touched
in conscience even, as to the condition of those they
govern; the markets of the world are being competed for
with an eagerness never before known; everything points to
the fact that the great commercial system is becoming un
manageable, and is slipping from the grasp of its present
rulers.
The one change possible out of all this is Socialism.
As chattel-slavery passed into serfdom, and serfdom into
the so-called free-labour system, so most surely will this
latter pass into social order.
To the realisation of this change the Socialist 1
League addresses itself with all earnestness. As a means
thereto it will do all in its power towards the education
of the people in the principles of this great cause, and
will strive to organise those who will accept this educa
tion, so that when the crisis comes, which the march of
events is preparing there may be a body of men ready to
step into their due places and deal with and direct the
irresistible movement.
Close fellowship with each other, and steady purpose
for the advancement of the Cause, will naturally bring
about the organisation and discipline amongst ourselves
absolutely necessary to success; but we shall look to it
that there shall be no distinctions of rank or dignity
amongst us to give opportunities for the selfish ambition
of leadership which has so often injured the cause of the
workers. We are working for equality and brotherhood for
all the world, and it is only through equality and broth
erhood that we can make our work effective.
Let us all strive, then, towards this end of real
ising the change towards social order, the only cause
worthy the attention of the workers of all that are prof
fered to them: let us work in that cause patiently, yet
hopefully, and not shrink from making sacrifices to it.
Industry in learning its principles, industry in teaching
them, are most necessary to our progress; but to these we
-must add, if we wish to avoid speedy failure, frankness
and fraternal trust in each other, and single-hearted de
votion to the religion of Socialism, the only religion
which the Socialist League professes.
258
Notes on the Manifesto
A. Refers to the necessary distributors who "belong
really to the class of the producers": also to profes
sional workers, like doctors: "Such men have nothing to
lose and everything to gain from a social revolution. . ."
B. "The standard of livelihood varies at different
times and in different countries: it has always been the
subject of bitter contention between employers and em
ployed . . . but the whole result of his higgling has al
ways been to leave at least a lowest class of labour ex
isting only a little above actual starvation. ..."
G. "The end which true Socialism sets before us is
the realization of absolute equality of condition, helped
by the development of variety of capacity, according to
the motto, from each one according to his capacity, to_
each one according to his needs; but it may be necessary,
and probably will be, to go through a transitional period,
during which currency will still be used as a medium of
exchange, though of course it will not bear the impress of
surplus value. Various suggestions have been made as to
the payment of labour during this period. The community
must compel a certain amount of labour from every person
not in nonage, or physically or mentally incapable, such
compulsion being in fact but the compulsion of nature,
who gives us nothing for nothing. 1st. This labour may
be arranged on the understanding that each person does an
amount of work calculated on the average than an ordinary
healthy person can turn out in a given time, the standard
being the time necessary for the production of a definite
quantity of bread-stuff. It is clear that under this sys
tem, owing to the difference of capacity one man may have
to work a longer and another a shorter time than the esti
mated average, and thus the result would fall short of the
Communistic ideal of absolute equality; but it is probable
that these differences would not have much practical ef
fect on social life; because the advantages gained by the
better workers could not be transmuted into the power of
compelling unpaid labour from others, since rent, profit,
and interest would have ceased to exist. Those who ob
tained the extra goods would have to consume than them
selves, otherwise they would be of no use to them. It
should also be remembered that the tendency of modern pro
duction is to equalise the capacities of labour by means
of machinery. . . .
"But 2ndly, labour might be so arranged that an esti
mated necessary average of time should be its basis, so
jthat no one would have to work longer than another, and
259
The community would have to put up with the differences
between various capacities. . . . The bourgeois will of
course cry out that this would be offering a premium to
idleness and stupidity; but once more we must not forget
that the use of machinery would much reduce the diffi
culty; and further, that as each would be encouraged to
develop his special capacity, apposition of usefulness
could be found for everyone. . . . Whatever residuum of
disadvantages was left would be met by the revolutionised
ethics of a Socialistic epoch, which would make all feel
their first duty to be the energetic performance of social
functions: shirking would be felt to be as much of a dis
grace then to the ordinary man as cowardice in the face of
an enemy is now to an officer in the army, and would be
avoided accordingly.
"Finally, we look forward to the time when any defi
nite exchange will have entirely ceased to exist; just as
it never existed in that primitive Communism which pre
ceded Civilisation.
"The enemy will say, 'This is retrogression not prog
ress'; to which we answer, All progress, every distinctive
stage of progress, involves a backward as well as a for
ward movement; the new development returns to a point
which represents the older principle elevated to a higher
plane; the old principle reappears transformed, purified,
made stronger, and ready to advance on the fuller life it
has gained through its seeming death. . . . The progress
of all life must be not on the straight line, but on the
spiral."
D. "The freedom from these sordid anxieties offers
the only chance to escape from the insipidity or the bit
terness, into one of which the lives of most men fall at
present. Then would real variety and healthy excitement
be introduced into human life. Then would come to an end
that 'dull level of mediocrity1 which is a necessary char
acter isTxF-o7~^m~-epocH’ —oF^apitalist production, which
forces all but a very small minority to become mere ma
chines. Individuality of character is the real child of
communal production; it is the reckless scramble for indi
vidual gain which reduces all character to a level by
giving it one object in life, an object sordid in itself,
|and to which all other objects and aspirations, however
noble, must bend and be subsidiary."
E. "A new system of industrial production must nec
essarily bear with it its own morality. Morality, which
jis a due state of Society, should mean nothing more than
jthe responsibility of the individual man to the social____
260
whole of which he forms a part, has come to mean his re
sponsibility to a supernatural being who arbitrarily
creates and directs his conscience and the laws which are
to govern it; although the attributes of this being are
but the reflex of some passing phase of man's existence,
and change more or less with that phase. A purely theo
logical morality, therefore, means simply a survival from
a past condition of Society; it may be added that, however
sacred it may be deemed conventionally, it is set aside
with little scruple when it clashes with the necessities
(unforeseen at its birth) which belong to the then exist
ing state of things.
"The economical change which we advocate, therefore,
would not be stable unless accompanied by a corresponding
revolution in ethics, which, however, is certain to ac
company it, since the two things are inseparable elements
of one whole, to wit social evolution."
P. "Under a Socialistic system contracts between in
dividuals would be voluntary and unenforced by the commu
nity. This would apply to the marriage contract as well
as others, and it would become a matter of simple incli
nation. Women also would share in the certainty of live
lihood which would be the lot of all; and children would
be treated from their birth as members of the community
entitled to share in all its advantages; so that economi
cal compulsion could be no more brought to bear on the
contract than legal compulsion could be. Nor would a
truly enlightened public opinion, freed from mere theo
logical views as to chastity, insist on its permanently
binding nature in the face of any discomfort or suffering
that might come of it."
Gr. A Baxian note on historical progress, concluding:
"'Happy,' says the proverb, 'is the people which has no
history.' Socialism closes /the/ era of antagonisms, and,
whatever may be the case as time goes on, and though we
cannot accept finality, at present we can see nothing
beyond it."
H. A critical note on "so-called co-operative
bodies."
I. A note stressing that land, under the capitalist
system, "is but one of the forms of capital."
J. "By political power we do not mean the exercise
of the franchise, or even the fullest development of the
representative system, but the direct control by the peo-
ple of the whole administration of the community , whatever
261
the ultimate destiny of that administration is to he."
Suggests that the enactment of a law of minimum wage and
maximum price might he a first step in the transition to
Communism.
E. Belfort Bax.
William Morris.
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