William Morris
From Philosopedia
Morris, William (24 March 1834 - 3 October 1896)
An English poet, artist, architect, interior decorator, book illuminator, furniture maker, lecturer, businessman, translator, essayist, printer, craftsman, Socialist campaigner, publisher, and painter, Morris is considered one of the great Victorians.
Life and Death of Jason (1867 was a poem in heroic couplets based on the story of Jason, Medea, and the Argonauts. It and Earthly Paradise (1868–1870) established Morris as one of the most popular poets of his day.
From 1876 onward, Morris took a fervent interest in social questions, and in 1883 he joined the Socialists. W. Allingham, his friend, wrote that by this time he had quite ceased to take an interest in theology. “It’s so unimportant, it seems to me,” he told Allingham. From this nonchalant attitude, Morris passed to atheism, and his friends tell how he used to declaim with great zest a certain scornfully anti-Christian couplet of Algernon Swinburne’s.
An early interest in the ritual and architecture of the Middle Ages led, after he read John Ruskin, to the ideas on aestheticism and social progress in his work. His News from Nowhere (1891), according to Corliss Lamont, “sketched a Humanist Utopia in terms of a simple and secularized village economy in which crowded cities and grimy factories are both eliminated and where regular work merges with applied art and the creation of beauty.” Art is the expression of joy in labor rather than an exclusive luxury. He made no distinction between art and craft and saw fine design and workmanship as the salvation of the industrial society.
The personal and family troubles Morris experienced are detailed in Norman Kelvin’s edition of The Collected Letters of William Morris (1995) and in Fiona MacCarthy’s William Morris: A Life for Our Time (1995). Jane, the daughter of an Oxford stable hand who became his wife, openly had an affair with the wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who once described Morris as an exhausted wombat. His wife, it is documented, never really loved Morris and married him only to rise from the working class. She witnessed his many temper tantrums and reacted coldly toward him.
Max Beerbohm recalled Morris as “a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him has always tired me.” Even fellow socialist George Bernard Shaw, noting Morris’s extreme fits of rage, speculated that Morris suffered from some form of epilepsy. Jenny, their daughter, was diagnosed at the age of sixteen as epileptic, and her grand mal seizures frightened both of her parents, who tied her to her bed in order to protect themselves as well as her. William Butler Yeats, however, said of Morris, “If some angel offered me the choice, I would choose to live his life, poetry and all, rather than my own or any other man’s.”
Morris believed in the “abolition of private property” and “the struggle against Capitalism.” His acquaintances included Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl, and Friedrich Engels.
A friend of the leading anarchists of his day, Morris was arrested for public disorder and he founded the Hammersmith Socialist Society. According to R. Page Arnot’s William Morris: The Man and the Myth, Morris, despite having his views distorted by his Christian Socialist friend Bruce Glasier, who claimed Morris was a religionist, stated, “I am what is called bluntly an atheist.”
Peter Faulkner, an editor of the Journal of the William Morris Society, has written extensively about Morris’s “socialist humanism.”
At his death at Kelmscott House in 1896, he was interred in the Kelmscott village churchyard. Morris was widely mourned as “our best man” by his fellow socialists, by whom he was deeply revered. His view that “the true incentive to useful and happy labour is, and must be, pleasure in the work itself” links his political and artistic aspirations, both of which have remained profoundly influential.
Critique
The Dictionary of National Biography describes Morris as follows:
- The fame of Morris during his life was probably somewhat obscured by the variety of his accomplishments. In all his work after he reached mature life there is a marked absence of extravagance, of display, of superficial cleverness or effectiveness, and an equally marked sense of composition and subordination. Thus his poetry is singularly devoid of striking lines or phrases, and his wall-papers and chintzes only reveal their full excellence by the lastingness of the satisfaction they give.
- His genius as a pattern-designer is allowed by all qualified judges to have been unequalled. This, if anything, he himself regarded as his specific profession; it was under the designation of "designer" that he enrolled himself in the socialist ranks and claimed a position as one of the working class. And it is the quality of design which, together with a certain fluent ease, distinguishes his work in literature as well as in industrial art.
- It is yet too early to forecast what permanent place he may hold among English poets. "The Defence of Guenevere" had a deep influence on a limited audience. With "Jason" and the "Earthly Paradise" he attained a wide popularity: and these poems, appearing as they did at a time when the poetic art in England seemed narrowing into mere labour on a thrice-ploughed field, not only gave a new scope, range, and flexibility to English rhymed verse, but recovered for narrative poetry a place among the foremost kinds of the art. A certain diffuseness of style may seem to be against their permanent life, so far as it is not compensated by a uniform wholesomeness and sweetness which indeed marks all Morris’s work.
- In "Sigurd the Volsung" Morris appears to have aimed higher than in his other poems, but not to have reached his aim with the same certainty; and his own return afterwards from epic to romance may indicate that the latter was the ground on which he was most at home. The prose romances of his later years have so far proved less popular in themselves than in the dilutions they have suggested to other writers. Here as elsewhere Morris’s great effect was to stimulate the artistic sense and initiate movements. So likewise it was with his political and social work. Much of it was not practical in the ordinary sense; but it was based on principles and directed towards ideals which have had a wide and profound influence over thought and practice.
(See entry for Frank Lloyd Wright.)
{CE; CL; OEL; Peter Faulkner, New Humanist, September 1996; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI}
