Hairy Teutons

Dante Gabriel Rossetti​ could always cheer himself up by belittling William Morris. At the top of a letter to Jane Morris in 1868, he scribbled a crest for ‘The Bard and Petty Tradesman’ in which Morris, plucking a lyre beneath a laurel tree, is back-to-back with his double, who is leaning over his shop counter. Sending up Morris as a hypocrite, intoning odes when he wasn’t flogging knick-knacks, was part of Rossetti’s campaign to seduce Jane. But it is fair to say that Morris’s relationship with literature was ambivalent. He read voraciously but fitfully, often preferring shlock from railway stalls to the Great Books he claimed to revere. After becoming a socialist, he snapped at friends that poetry was now ‘unimportant work’. He was embarrassed when a comrade introduced him to a policeman as ‘the author of The Earthly Paradise’ – his most celebrated work. No: he was just ‘a shopkeeper, carrying on business in Oxford Street’.

Admirers of Morris the revolutionary have shared his uncertainties. George Bernard Shaw thought Morris’s late-life addiction to scribbling prose romances a lowering hobby – why not take up making musical instruments instead? When Morris’s former secretary Sydney Cockerell trekked to Yasnaya Polyana, he was disappointed to learn that Tolstoy regarded News from Nowhere as not a patch on Charles Dickens. Tolstoy was surprised in turn to learn that Morris had been ‘a craftsman as well as a writer’. E.P. Thompson’s superb study of 1955, which established the fierce cogency of Morris’s Marxism, dismissed most of his verse as the ‘poetry of escape’. The romances moved him to ask whether ‘Morris had gone soft in the head.’ In our consumerist culture, he lives mainly in the mass reproduction of his designs (I have the ‘Strawberry Thief’ pattern on my doormat) rather than his words.

Ingrid Hanson’s considered selection from his writings is unlikely to correct this imbalance but should prompt us to reflect on its injustice. Selection here entails much omission, because Morris wrote with appalling fluency. Composing verse on trains or while sat at the loom, he could turn out a thousand lines a day. One friend used to stab herself with pins to stay awake during his interminable recitals. Although Hanson’s volume runs to six hundred closely printed pages, it completely omits some long poems, all of his translations and his fragmentary novel of contemporary life. There are a few chapters from the late prose romances, just a handful of his letters –though his published correspondence runs to four hefty volumes – and a smattering from his half a million words of political journalism. Still, Hanson strikes a balance between the representative, the surprising and the obligatory, pushing us to ask anew how we might connect his prodigious if uneven writing with his dizzying array of concerns.

Like many a young writer, Morris already had an income. When he came of age in 1855, he began drawing an annuity of £900. His father, a bill broker turned gentleman who bought his own coat of arms, had died in 1847, leaving the family his mining investments. Although Hanson follows fashion in presenting Morris as an icon of the ecohumanities – the prophet of Extinction Rebellion rather than the dictatorship of the proletariat – his activities long relied on the proceeds of a mine that sent men underground in the dangerous pursuit of copper and other minerals. The Devon Great Consols polluted streams, cast up slag heaps and once supplied world markets with half of their arsenic. Even as a studiously rumpled bohemian, Morris served as one of its directors, buying a top hat for meetings, which he defiantly crushed when his term ended. Marlborough and Exeter College, Oxford had instilled a churchy disdain for low commercialism. Though he quickly tired of Christian ‘mumbo-jumbo’, he was a lifelong lover of churches. Hanson includes a letter from an early trip to northern France, which shows him already coming to understand Gothic cathedrals not as built expressions of doctrine but as outcrops of a landscape and the folk who loved it.

Morris toyed with becoming an architect at a time when architects considered the Gothic style a rational choice for modern needs. George Edmund Street, who briefly employed him, built schools and law courts as well as stiff churches. The Defence of Guenevere (1858), Morris’s first volume of poetry, is wilder in its use of medieval materials. He took the brutal Froissart rather than the courtly Malory as his model and shook a Pre-Raphaelite lance at ‘bourgeoisdom and philistinism’. ‘Golden Wings’ starts out with the euphonious nothings you might chant after too much of Morris’s favourite claret: ‘Who walked in that garden there?/Miles and Giles and Isabeau,/Tall Jehane du Castel beau/Alice of the golden hair.’ But their fortress is raided and the inmates perish. Now, on the moat, ‘inside the rotting leaky boat/You see a slain man’s stiffen’d feet.’

These are violent and erotic poems. Morris has his eye on long throats and roving hands as well as corpses. Sex and death mingle in ‘The Haystack in the Floods’ when Jehane is captured with her lover Robert. She sees a ‘long bright blade without a flaw/Glide out from Godmar’s sheath’ and cut Robert’s throat, who ‘moan’d as dogs do, being half dead’. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, one of the most prolific shaggers of the Victorian era, wrote that his friend Morris was oblivious to sex. You can see why Blunt thought so: Morris didn’t seem to notice, still less to protest, when Blunt tiptoed down the corridors of Kelmscott Manor to Jane’s bed. But this was to mistake resignation for innocence.

Despite the jagged effusions of Guenevere, medievalism initially meant domesticity and conjugal love for Morris. A year after his poems appeared he appalled friends by marrying Jane, the daughter of a stable keeper, and then got Philip Webb to build the Red House for his family just south of London. Although once canonised as the first modernist dwelling on account of its simple layout and truth to materials, Morris described it as ‘very medieval in spirit’. Perhaps too medieval: Webb’s macabre wedding gift was a bedroom wardrobe decorated by Edward Burne-Jones with the blood libel story from Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’. The Virgin Mary – modelled by Jane – tends to St Nicholas, who had his throat cut by the Jews before miraculously returning to life.

Furnishing the Red House inspired Morris to set up the Firm (it did not become Morris and Co. until 1875, when he bought out his founding partners). It initially traded on the Tractarian revival by producing stained glass windows, hand-painted tiles and other such Gothic fittings for churches and Cambridge colleges (as a student, I ate many meals between the stencilled walls of Peterhouse’s hall, though it doesn’t seem to have improved me much). They soon developed products for affluent homeowners, too, from rush-bottomed Sussex chairs to the wallpapers and printed chintzes of the 1870s and the rugs and carpets of the 1880s.

This commodification of medievalism fostered a decorative turn in his verse. The Chaucerian conceit of The Earthly Paradise, the first volume of which appeared to rapturous reviews in 1868, is that a shipload of Vikings on a quest for immortality has pitched up in Byzantium, where they swap classical, northern and eastern tales with their hosts. This anthology of legends is also a rich book of hours. Morris was said as a boy to ‘know the names of birds’ and the prologues to the tales, which evoke the characteristic sights of the months, draw on his deep immersion in nature. In ‘February’, ‘One lonely rook doth dare/The gale, and beats above the unseen corn,/Then turns, and whirling down the wind is borne.’ These vignettes entangle human striving with nature just as his wallpapers and textiles quoted plant forms to bring the outside into domestic interiors. The interweaving of national mythologies also recalls Morris’s historicist understanding of the way decorative ornament passes between peoples. The ‘mysterious symbols of worships and beliefs’ of one nation are picked up, simplified and recombined by the artisans of another, becoming the ‘habit of the hand’. Like the Persian carpets Morris admired for their ‘intellectualism’, his poems interlaced Troy, Byzantium and Arabia. He compared the difficulties of writing his next multilayered long poem, Love Is Enough (1872), to lining up the repeats in a tapestry.

The risk of weaving verse is that you end up turning it out by the yard: The Earthly Paradise eventually ran to 42,000 lines. By describing himself in its preface as the ‘idle singer of an empty day’, Morris encouraged people to dismiss his entire corpus as whiffle. That is unfair, but Hanson’s extracts suggest how easily his poetry could become a mellifluous soporific. Just as we ‘dream of blossomed May’ in the ‘chill thaw’ of February, so the ‘hapless lover’s dull shame sinks/Away sometimes in day-dreams, and he thinks/No more of yesterday’s disgrace and foil.’ The disgrace was personal. By the time he was writing the poem, the Red House was sold and Jane was involved with Rossetti, who called her Lucrezia Borgia and documented their affair in blazing portraits. Morris compounded everyone’s suffering by deciding to let the lovely Kelmscott Manor as their country bolthole. Rossetti installed himself there and poisoned it with his drugged paranoia. Perhaps the romance of marriage would have dwindled anyway, even without this skunk in the orchard. In 1869, the Morrises spent an uncomfortable summer at Baden-Baden so that Jane could undergo the town’s renowned and thunderous douches for a gynaecological disorder. Soon afterwards their daughter Jenny developed epilepsy, which Morris blamed on his own splenetic constitution.

Iceland rescued him. The rigours of his trip there in 1871 were invigorating (he cooked whatever the party shot) and he came away strengthened in his belief that the ‘Northmen’ had found in their sagas a kind of courage that beat anything modern civilisation could offer. Sigurd the Volsung (1876), which Morris thought his best work, was his exploration of this primitivism. Some have disliked the weird first half and preferred the later books, a close study of marital jealousy – Ibsen in furs. Hanson prefers to give us the former only, the story of Sigurd’s ancestry, his slaying of the dragon Fafnir and journey through a river of fire to claim the sleeping Brynhild. It is horribly violent. Sigurd’s father, Sigmund, is lashed to an oak and has to watch as wolves devour his screaming brothers. Later on, he and his incestuously begotten son, Sinfiotli (a story in itself), become serial-killing werewolves, before Sigmund rips out Sinfiotli’s throat in a frenzy (he recovers). Morris revels in a world where individuals don’t count and dotes on the cruel logic with which people will do anything for their ‘house’. Sinfiotli seizes his infant half-siblings and ‘breaketh each tender body as a drunkard breaketh a cup’.

The language sealed the moral archaism. The poem’s vernacular balladry is hobnailed with coinages Morris had hit on in his effortful translations of Icelandic sagas. An army is a ‘flood of murder’, a river the ‘bath of the swan’. His similes are truly epic in refusing to gesture to a world beyond the one his characters know: spears are ‘laid like the oars of a longship’. In becoming the northern Homer, Morris sought to show the way art could embody collective experience. Although his characters are the pawns of Odin, they sustain themselves in singing of how their exploits make history. For the dwarf Regin, who leads Sigurd to Fafnir, to be human is to move through time. Before the ‘short-lived thralls of the Gods’ came along, he and the other dwarves felt that ‘no weight of memory maimed us.’ People brought them technology, but also the ‘grief that remembers the past, and the fear that the future sees’. His lament is truer than he knows: Sigurd beheads him in his sleep, using the sword he forged for him.

Although Wagner’s Ring took the same ancient sagas as its source material, Morris hated it. He shuddered at the gas-lit japes of Bayreuth: Fafnir became a pantomime dragon and Siegfried squeezed Brynhilde’s breasts while warbling ‘Das ist kein Mann.’ Yet his outrage at Wagner’s irreverence was overblown (after all, he named the topiary dragon in his Kelmscott garden Fafnir). Wagner and Morris both cast their Volsung heroes as slayers of a sick bourgeoisie. Sigurd is the ‘Wild-thing Glorious’ and draws his potency from nature: after tasting Fafnir’s blood, he understands the eagles who warn him against Regin. While Morris opposed attempts to turn his poems into socialist allegories, the ‘river of fire’ that Sigurd crosses to claim Brynhild stayed in his mind. He later exhorted socialists to ‘carry their purpose’ across a ‘river of violence’.

Morris grappled with Le Capital – he read Marx in French because his German was shaky – until his copy disintegrated. Its stadial story of the proletariat’s rise and future triumph appealed to his historicist mind. Yet the fact that he developed a systematic understanding of capitalism does not explain why he craved its end. The cardinal sin of bourgeois civilisation was its ugliness. He had always made aesthetics the test of political economy. As a young man, he fancied that the sumptuous cornfields of the French countryside were planted ‘for their beauty only’. He revered Ruskin for teaching him that only free artisans could create beautiful things. Ruskin later hailed Morris as ‘beaten gold’, while confiding that his own ‘love of Turner, primroses and little girls’ prevented them from seeing altogether eye to eye. Morris’s copy of Le Capital is an art object as well as a manual: after it fell apart, he had it rebound in a gilded turquoise goatskin.

In the late 1870s, Morris hesitantly took to prose to share his achievements as a designer, while explaining their futility. He eventually delivered more than a hundred lectures. Hanson prints the key texts that introduced his ethics of production and consumption: good ornament is the ‘expression of man’s pleasure in successful labour’; ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’ The diktats came with the authority of experience: the hand that wrote them was permanently blue with indigo. At Thomas Wardle’s factory in Leek, Staffordshire and then at his own workshop at Merton Abbey, Morris fussed over the dye vat, drawing on antiquarian books to revive older and better modes of manufacture. Yet the freedom was his alone. He bullied Wardle’s workmen, invoking market forces to demand absolute fidelity to his designs. At Merton, his preference for block printing of wallpapers obliged many workers to stick to repetitive piecework. When he later started the Kelmscott Press, he overruled the pressmen who said the linseed ink he had ordered from Germany was too stiff to use.

The problem of ‘dull work’ palled before the impossibility of making beautiful things viable under capitalism. The point was not to defend handicraft production – Morris deployed machines when it suited him – but to reject a society that used machines merely to chase profits and in so doing made workers ‘lead the life of machines’. The more capitalists could force workers to make goods for their exchange value rather than their use, the more they frustrated their natural delight in elaborating patterns. The immiseration of workers made it impossible that they should ever be able to afford or even want the kinds of things Morris made. The ugly swearing he heard from the steamers that passed under the windows of his riverside study at Hammersmith haunted him. With the eye of a decorator, he noted that this popular brutalisation will ‘often show without much peeling through the selfish refinement of those who have let it accumulate’.

These lectures take a dogmatic view of beauty as an objective quantity that is inexorably diminishing – rather as Victorian Protestants talked about faith. But in other moods they express a materialist doctrine that all art is the expression of social relations, with the added contention that the art produced by cohesive and equal societies is somehow more beautiful. The argument was thoroughly circular because collective, apparently unconscious works – Cotswold villages or Kurdish rugs – were what Morris preferred to begin with, hating as he did works of individual genius or effortful novelties, such as Paradise Lost or the contents of the Crystal Palace. Yet it readied him for the Marxist transformation of society.

He quickly came to describe the state as just a pawn in the looming struggle between workers and capitalists. He was already a republican who loathed ‘Empress Brown’. His involvement in the popular movement to stop Disraeli going to war to protect a murderous Ottoman regime against the Tsar led him to write off Parliament as a ‘dying thing’. The police guarded capitalists at home and the military forced Britain’s shoddy goods onto ‘valiant barbarians’. Thompson, whose study of Morris appeared just before the Suez Crisis, was the first to see clearly that anti-imperialism was intrinsic to his decidedly internationalist vision. He shared Blunt’s indignation at the British invasions of Egypt and Burma and the coercion of Irish Nationalists. England was not the ‘axle-tree of the world’ and its gruesome depredations would only cease when its workers joined with foreign peoples to abandon ‘commercial war’.

Although​ Morris became a card-carrying socialist – on the same day in 1883 that Exeter made him an honorary fellow – he struggled to find the right vehicle for his hopes. Thompson estimated that at this time there were about two hundred declared socialists in Britain: Morris fell out with most of them, founding and then abandoning the Socialist League before finally settling in the Hammersmith Socialist Society, which conveniently met in the stable block of his house. Although he expended much ink (and money) on newspapers, they enjoyed only modest circulations and failed in ‘educating people into desiring’ revolution. Hanson gives us some of his songs, in which fighting nouns – ‘the crown’, ‘the cause’, ‘the battle’ – troop lugubriously across the page. The propagandist essays and lectures of which Hanson gives a fair sample were cogent, but Morris sensed they did not land. He most enjoyed presenting them when they caused a dust-up – as when, at Oxford, undergraduate rowdies cleared the room with a stink bomb. It beat lecturing in Peckham or Stepney, where the bad smells came from the bodies of his stolid audience.

William the Volsung never blanched at the violence it would take to overthrow the state. Yet it became obvious that ‘establishment power’ would win any street fight for decades to come. On ‘Bloody Sunday’ in November 1887, Morris grudgingly admired the skilful deployment by the authorities of thuggish policemen and the Household Cavalry to hospitalise two hundred demonstrators and hold Trafalgar Square. If the river of fire burned too fiercely to cross, Morris also had to explain why it would be worth doing so. H.E. Luxmoore, a teacher at Eton who enjoyed the lecture Morris gave at the school, could not understand ‘what he wanted to arrive at by destroying the existing society’. Morris told people that he couldn’t promise to abolish the need for labour, only to make it truly pleasurable by vanquishing the drones that forced others to toil for profit. But is work fun? And could we ever abolish its most degrading forms? Oscar Wilde – who bought Morris wallpapers – wondered what such ideals meant to the street sweeper forced to labour for eight hours at the ‘slushy crossing’.

Morris took refuge from such conundrums in stories serialised in socialist papers and then printed as his most popular books. The narrator of A Dream of John Ball (1888) sleepwalks into the Peasants’ Revolt. Morris’s Chaucerian argot makes it a slog. Characters say such things as ‘Thou lookest partly mazed’ and ‘Thou sayeth sooth.’ Yet he had not lost his feeling for violence. His yeomen form one of the village communities that fascinated the anthropologists of the time and defend it against cavalry with a sureness that deserted the marchers on Trafalgar Square. Writing at a moment when socialists were despairing, Morris showed how the ironies of history compensate for defeat. Just before the narrator’s vision fades, he uses his hindsight (foresight?) to explain to John Ball, the rebel leader, that he will first lose then win his war. Because it is capitalists not peasants who will eventually topple the bad barons, centuries of misery will follow, before the proletariat create the ‘fellowship’ Ball craves in a deeper form than he could have imagined. As Morris put it in one of his theoretical writings, progress for socialists is not a straight line but a ‘spiral’.

In News from Nowhere (1890), Morris wakes in his Hammersmith house to ramble through the decentralised, decarbonised, communist England that has emerged after the revolution of 1952. It is rich with the pleasures of such ‘what if’ exercises. You can net salmon in the pristine Thames. Long Acre is fields and the ruins of Parliament are a warehouse for manure. Setting News from Nowhere in the near future allowed Morris to settle present-day scores: posterity has condemned meddlers who wanted to pull down Oxford and thin out his beloved Epping Forest. As for Wilde’s horrible jobs, volunteers take turns doing them. Yet it remains a dream rather than a blueprint, whose aim is to explore what it is like to escape the insistent pressure of the present. Its future islanders have lost interest in past or future: they realise what Wilde defined as the joy of socialism and simply are. They are also free from nagging attachments to each other, such as the passionless marriage that had racked Morris. The narrator considers forming a union with the beautiful Ellen, but she prefers fondling the sun-warmed walls of Kelmscott Manor: her erogenous zone is England itself.

There is something rather Californian about this Merry England, whose sun-bronzed folk are too happy to do much reading. It is tempting to side with Ellen’s querulous grandfather, who pines for the day before yesterday when people hated each other and wrote interesting books; News from Nowhere is so restful as to be boring. The sprawling romances Morris wrote up until his death in 1896 have never found many readers. Hanson prints mere snippets from a couple of them, so it is difficult to decide whether contemporaries were right to dismiss them as the maunderings of ‘Will o’the Wildgoose Chase’. They do seem to mirror the cooling commitment to agitation of his very last years. They take place not in a tangible future but in foggy Teutonic pasts or else in wholly fantastic lands. The Sundering Flood (1896) was the first book printed with a map of its imaginary places: this was the route to Narnia and Middle Earth. Their publication by the Kelmscott Press heightens the suspicion that his proto-hobbits were just a hobbyist diversion. You could argue that its ornately, at times illegibly, typeset books defied capitalism’s demands for quick print, but it was an oblique rebellion. C.S. Lewis made the best case for the romances in the 1930s: they showed that the ‘totalitarian’ Morris never tired of picturing the pleasures of communism. Most socialists could not express the common good they kept invoking and so had nothing to offer but ‘ballot papers or soup tickets’. Morris knew ‘as concretely as Burke or Tolstoy what he wants’, even if his communists were hairy Teutons.

What Morris wanted seems less workable than ever. He would have regarded most of the efforts since his death to draw reformist plans of action from his work as failures or travesties. It is fun to imagine his reaction to Tony Blair’s claim that News from Nowhere was the inspiration for New Labour. But even trying to predict what he would have hated about the present says more about us than him. Not long before Blair took office, Morris’s biographer Fiona MacCarthy made a list of his probable bugbears that now reads like a period piece: university modules, ‘executive phones’ and ‘video porn’. Where his words will never lose their force is in their demand that we turn away from the page – or screen – to gain power from things. He once told a friend that the ugliness of his day proceeded from a ‘Manichean hatred of the world’, a failure by his contemporaries to see or feel what lay before them. His protest might be futile, but ‘I cannot help it.’ He had a ‘sort of faith’ that ‘something will come of it, some kind of culture of which we know nothing at present.’