WILLIAM 
 MORRIS 
 
 SOCIALIST- 
 CRAFTSMAN 
 
 alifornia 
 
 ^ional 
 
 jility 
 
 
LllRAKt 
 
 University of 
 California 
 Twine 
 
SOCIAL REFORMERS SERIES, NO. 3 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 CRAFTSMAN SO CIALIST 
 
Social Reformers Series 
 
 Crown 8vo, attractive wrapper s^ 6d. each nett {postage \d.\ 
 or \ cloth gilt top, is. each nett (postage zd.} 
 
 VOLUMES NOW READY. 
 
 1. Robert Owen : Social Pioneer. 
 
 By Joseph Clayton. 
 
 2. Henry George and his Gospel. 
 
 By Lieut.-Col. D. C. Pedder. 
 
 "Mr. Fifield's series of 'Social Reformers' makes an excellent start 
 with these two volume*. . . . What strikes us most in Mr. Clayton's 
 account of Owen is the astounding modernity of Owen's views and 
 methods." New tAge. 
 
 "They are sympathetically written, and contain a good summary of the 
 life and labours of two remarkable pioneers." "Re-view of 3(evieios. 
 
 "Both are quite exceptionally well written and interesting books. . . . 
 Colonel Pedder'i account of George's singular and very lovable character 
 will be new to many." Manchester Guardian. 
 
 " Mr. Joseph Clayton is a delightful writer, and he makes the story of 
 Robert Owen's life read like a romance." Clarion. 
 
 " Two excellent little books. Mr. Fifield is to be congratulated on his 
 new series, which should receive a ready welcome from Socialists. . . . With 
 all the great single-taxer's limitations, he was a force to be reckoned with, 
 and no Socialist can afford to ignore the man and his mission. . . . Mr. 
 Clayton's book on Owen is invaluable ; it should be on the shelf of every 
 Socialist library." Justice. 
 
 " So many recruits are daily coming into the Socialist forces that a series 
 of this sort is extremely timely." Leicester "Pioneer, 
 
 " A particularly warm welcome must be offered to this series. . . . Each 
 writer has produced a comprehensive, lucid, and fascinating book." 
 
 Dundee tAd-verther. 
 
 3. William Morris : Craftsman- 
 
 Socialist. By Holbrook Jackson. 
 
 Just published. Deals especially with two aspects of Morris's 
 career of immense importance to-day. 
 
 London : A. C. Fifield, 44 Fleet Street, E.G. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 CRAFTSMAN SOCIALIST 
 
 By 
 
 HOLBROOK JACKSON 
 
 Author of "Bernard Shaw i a Monograph' 
 
 Social Reformers Series, No. 3 
 
 LONDON 
 A. C. FIFIELD, 44 FLEET STREET, E.G. 
 
 1908 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 Introduction 5 
 
 Chapter 
 
 I. Childhood and Youth . . 7 
 
 II. Oxford Days . . . . . n 
 
 III. From Craftsmanship to Socialism - * . 15 
 
 IV. Last Years .... .22 
 V. Craftsmanship, (i) The Idea of Handicraft . 26 
 
 VI. (2) The Revival of Handicraft 35 
 
 VII. Socialism 39 
 
 f 
 
 VIII. Militant Socialism 45 
 
 IX. Communism ....... 5 
 
 X. The Fellowship of Man 5 6 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 CRAFTSMAN SOCIALIST 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 MOST ages produce men who seem specially marked 
 out for leadership, who by sheer force of personality 
 alone impress and convince their fellows into some new 
 line of action or some fresh view of life. In some cases 
 their personalities have a sudden effect, readily convincing 
 large numbers of people, and filling them with eager 
 enthusiasm. Others have a more insinuating way of doing 
 their work ; they impress only a very few, and often lead 
 popular opinion into the belief that they are making no 
 impression at all. Of the work of such leaders of thought 
 it may be said that it is not fully born but has to serve a 
 further period of growth in the minds of men before it enters 
 into full orders of practical life. The leadership of William 
 Morris was of a type that partook of some of the qualities 
 of each of these two. 
 
 As a teacher he was never without followers, but he never 
 made a popular impression upon his age. The impression 
 he made was profound rather than broad. Those who 
 came directly under the influence of his teaching and ex- 
 ample were moved to desire nothing better than to devote 
 their whole energies to carrying out his ideals. And he 
 worked so thoroughly and so earnestly himself that his 
 influence cannot but increase as the years go by. Those 
 who were moved by his imagination and zeal, by his skill 
 a3 a craftsman, and by his eager earnestness as a Socialist, 
 were not confined to any one section of society. - They 
 came from all classes, and by good fortune they were in 
 
6 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 many cases the people most capable, if not always of actu- 
 ally carrying on his great task, at least of keeping it alive. 
 
 Already his name is beginning to stand out among the 
 names of his contemporaries, much as his personality stood 
 out for those who knew and understood him best during his 
 life. The arch-critic, Time, is gradually weeding out the 
 ephemeral persons of that period, revealing in the process 
 this dreamer of dreams as one of the greatest and most 
 practical forces of his day. More important than this is 
 the fact that the work of William Morris is becoming better 
 understood. The dangers which threatened his craft-work, 
 in the imitative popularity of the past few years, like all 
 shallow fashions, is passing away; and the intimate 
 connection between his craftsmanship and his politics is 
 in the way of being properly appreciated, not only by his 
 followers, but by a wider public. 
 
 The beautiful things he made are taking their right place 
 in the lives of many people as details and practical ex- 
 amples of a new social order. It is now more clearly 
 understood that these things are not finally objects of 
 fashion, toys and bric-a-brac for rich or idle people, nor 
 " specimens " for art collectors and connoisseurs, but that 
 they are the common objects of daily use which he intended 
 them to be, the anticipated products of that future 
 state in which he had such abounding faith, when they 
 would be the natural outcome of work done in fellow- 
 ship and happiness. If William Morris stands for any 
 idea he stands for that ; and coming generations will 
 gather strength and inspiration from his life, only as they 
 realize his ideal of the organic relationship between art 
 and conduct. 
 
CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS, born at Elm House, Clay Hill, 
 Walthamstow, on 24 March, 1834, was of Welsh 
 and English descent. His paternal grandfather was a 
 tradesman of Worcester, who married a daughter of Dr. 
 Charles Stanley, a naval surgeon, of Nottingham. His 
 father was born at Worcester, and at the age of twenty- three 
 he went to London, where he entered, and afterwards 
 became a partner in a discount - broking house in the 
 City. Mr. Morris was a keen man of affairs, and his 
 efforts in the firm, together with a successful invest- 
 ment in Cornish copper mines, soon made him a man of 
 means. Shortly after becoming a partner he married 
 Emma Skelton, the daughter of a Worcester family of 
 repute to whom the Morrises were distantly related. 
 
 The newly married couple set up house over the business 
 premises in Lombard Street, and here their eldest children, 
 both daughters, were born. In 1833 they removed to 
 Walthamstow, and William Morris was born hi the following 
 year. The house was pleasantly situated within two miles 
 of Epping Forest, overlooking the Lea Valley, a district 
 with which the early days of the reformer were closely 
 associated. In 1840, when William was six years old a 
 removal was made across the forest to Woodford Hall, a 
 large Georgian mansion in fifty acres of park, on the high 
 road between London and Epping. The family remained 
 here until 1848, when, on the death of Mr. Morris, they 
 returned to Walthamstow, where they lived at Water 
 House until 1856. 
 
 Practically the whole of William Morris's youth was 
 thus spent amid the romantic surroundings of Epping 
 Forest, and the beauty and mystery of its glades of pollarded 
 hornbeam, beech and holly, as well as the large skies and 
 lone distances of the Essex lowlands, entered deep into 
 
8 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 his nature. He was quite conscious of the beauty 
 of his surroundings, and when he was away at Marl- 
 borough College his imagination always wandered back 
 to Epping. " It is now only seven weeks to the holidays," 
 he wrote to a sister in the earliest extant specimen of his 
 writing ; " there I go again ! Just like me ! always 
 harping on the holidays. I am sure you must think me a 
 great fool to be always thinking about home, but I really 
 can't help it. I don't think it is my fault, for there are 
 such a lot of things I want to do and say and see." 
 
 As a child William Morris was delicate, but he soon 
 gained strength in the pure air of Epping. He was studious 
 and retiring, and at a very early age a devoted reader. 
 In fact, neither he nor any member of his family knew ex- 
 actly when he learnt to read ; it would seem to have been a 
 faculty which he acquired by instinct. At the age of four 
 he was reading the Waverley Novels. By the age of 
 seven he had devoured Scott and most of Marryat, and 
 Lane's " Arabian Nights " had become a constant source of 
 Joy. At an early age, also, he was impressed by colour and 
 form, and remembered in after life how his childish mind 
 had been moved by a picture of Abraham and Isaac 
 worked In worsted ; by Indian cabinets ; by a carved 
 ivory junk with gilded puppets; and by "naif gross ghost 
 stories, read long ago in queer little penny garlands with 
 woodcuts." His love of the pictorial also found food in the 
 beautiful illustrations to Gerard's " Herbal," a copy of which 
 he found among the books of the house. It is probable 
 that the study of this book, as well as his early interest in 
 Heraldry, laid the foundations of many of his later designs. 
 But early as he acquired the reading faculty, he did not learn 
 how to use a pen until much after the usual age, and he 
 never became reliable in his spelling. An instance of this 
 exists in the fact that several sheets of " The Life and Death 
 of Jason " had to be cancelled and reprinted owing to a 
 mistake in the spelling of a simple word, a word so 
 common as to have convinced the printer's reader that 
 Morris's version was intentional. 
 
 Up to the age of nine William Morris received no educa- 
 tion save an occasional lesson from his sisters' governess. 
 
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 9 
 
 Then he was sent to a " preparatory school for young 
 gentlemen," kept by two ladies, at first in Walthamstow, 
 when Morris rode backwards and forwards on his pony, 
 and later at Woodford. In 1848, when he was just under 
 fourteen, he entered the then newly-founded Marlborough 
 College near Swindon, remaining there until 1851. In 
 these early years the college was in a state of chaos, there 
 was no organization, insufficient accommodation and 
 funds, and building operations were going on all the time he 
 was there. 
 
 The educational system was bad even for those days, 
 but this was of little importance to a genius of the type 
 of Morris. His education went on apart from system. 
 He found the materials in Savernake Forest and on the 
 Downs ; in the ancient barrows of Silbury Hill and Pewsey 
 Vale ; in the stone circles of Avebury and the Roman 
 Villa at Kennet; in the ancient churches of the district 
 and in the college library, which was fortunately well 
 provided with works on archaeology and ecclesiastical 
 architecture. In after years he used to say that he left 
 Marlborough " a good archaeologist, and knowing most of 
 what there was to be known about English Gothic." And 
 this was the basis of all his future activities. 
 
 The childhood and youth of William Morris were a con- 
 tinuous romance ; not a romance of actual deeds, but of 
 coloured dreams. The joys of knight errantry were his as 
 he raced about Woodford Hall upon his pony clad in a suit 
 of toy armour. Wherever he was he recreated his sur- 
 roundings out of his own visions. He roamed over Epping 
 and Savernake pondering deeply upon the life of those beau- 
 tiful places, giving them for himself and for those who then 
 had his confidence, and for those who have since read his 
 books, a new significance. The backgrounds of many of 
 his finest romances are records of the impressions of these 
 days. At school he was not noted for sport, nor, in the 
 ordinary way, for study. He played his own game of life 
 and had his own intellectual method. He had a violent 
 temper, and was thought a little mad by his schoolfellows, 
 who, nevertheless, were not averse to listening to his endless 
 stories about knights and fairies. He had the usual boyish 
 
io WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 enthusiasm for silkworms and birds' eggs, but generally 
 he turned to books and to Nature in her broadest sense. 
 Even in these early days the intense activity of hand and 
 brain, which so characterized his whole life, began to show 
 itself. It is recorded how his fingers must ever be handling 
 something ; and a story is told of how he gained relief from 
 this restlessness by endless netting. " With one end of the 
 net fastened to a desk in the big schoolroom he would work 
 at it for hours together, his fingers moving almost auto- 
 matically." 
 
 It was decided that he should study for the Church, and, 
 upon leaving Marlborough College, he read at home with a 
 private tutor till he was able to go up to Oxford for matricu- 
 lation. The bent of his mind and imagination at this time, 
 his love not only of medieval architecture and old churches 
 and church music, but of the very spirit of medievalism, 
 pointed to the Church as his natural vocation. His tutor 
 was the Rev. F. B. Guy, afterwards Canon of St. Alban's, a 
 man of similar tastes and sympathies to those of his 
 pupil. Morris went up to Oxford in June, 1852, and 
 matriculated at Exeter College. It was during the ex- 
 amination in the Hall of Exeter that he first met Edward 
 Burne- Jones. 
 
CHAPTER II. OXFORD DAYS 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS entered into residence at Exeter 
 College, Oxford, in 1853, and took his Bachelor's 
 degree in 1856 ; it was during these three years that the 
 curve of his future life was determined. Oxford, of all 
 cities, was the one most likely to develop such a nature as 
 his. The romance and life of the Middle Ages in which he 
 had steeped his mind, survived in the noble building of the 
 place, feeding his imagination with just that sense of reality 
 he required. The new-found fellowship with Edward 
 Burne-Jones, which was to grow into one of the memorable 
 friendships of modern biography, gave him for the first 
 time in life a full and intimate companionship in tastes and 
 ideals. 
 
 He was already familiar with the poems of Tennyson, 
 and he had read with enthusiasm the early volumes of 
 " Modern Painters." 
 
 The ideas to which he was introduced by this book were 
 to be augmented and turned into something like a religion 
 when Ruskin published " The Stones of Venice." The 
 epoch-making chapter called " The Nature of Gothic " 
 became a bible for him, and years afterwards he reverently 
 printed it on the Kelmscott Press. The teachings of 
 Charles Kingsley and Frederick Denison Maurice also had 
 their influence, as well as those of Carlyle. But after 
 Ruskin no books held Morris so firmly and meant so much 
 to him, both then and afterwards, as Chaucer's poems and 
 Malory's " Morte d' Arthur." 
 
 Burne-Jones and Morris, so far as their own college was 
 concerned, lived very much to themselves. But the 
 former had a circle of Birmingham friends at Pembroke 
 College. Morris became one of this group of ardent souls, 
 which included, besides Burne-Jones and himself, William 
 Fulford, Cormell Price, Harry Macdonald, and Richard 
 
12 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Watson (afterwards Canon) Dixon. They came to be 
 known among themselves as " the set/' and later on as the 
 Brotherhood. Their aim at first was the application 
 of religious and philosophical ideas to life, and there was 
 serious talk of Morris founding and endowing a monastery 
 wherein they might follow the ideals they had set for 
 themselves ideals largely evolved out of their enthusiasm 
 for Ruskin, Carlyle, and Tennyson. 
 
 But this desire never came to anything, because Morris 
 soon realized those leanings towards art, always latent, 
 and which eventually determined the true course of his 
 life. On his coming of age he inherited a fortune of some- 
 thing under 1000 a year. At this time he was still bent 
 upon Holy Orders ; but gradually he discovered that he 
 could better express his mission in life by weaving his 
 imagination into works of art. At this period Morris 
 was an aristocrat with monastic and humanitarian ideals. 
 
 He was healthy, tireless in the work he loved, busy with 
 modern ideas and studies of ancient, particularly medieval 
 times ; playful, athletic, with an amazing amount of 
 special knowledge and compelling enthusiasms. 
 
 There are two contemporary descriptions of him at about 
 this time. The earlier is by Burne- Jones. " From the 
 first I knew how different he was from all the men I had 
 ever met." He says: "He talked with vehemence and 
 sometimes with violence. I never knew him languid or 
 tired. He was slight in figure in those days ; his hair was 
 dark brown and very thick, his nose straight, his eyes 
 hazel - coloured, his mouth exceedingly delicate and 
 beautiful." This portrait is confirmed by Canon Dixon, 
 writing a year or two later, who says : " At this time Morris 
 was an aristocrat and a High Churchman. His manners 
 and tastes and sympathies were all aristocratic. His 
 countenance was beautiful in features and expression, 
 particularly in the expression of purity. Occasionally 
 it had a melancholy look. He had a finely cut mouth, the 
 short upper lip adding greatly to the purity of expression. 
 I have a vivid recollection of the splendid beauty of his 
 expression at this time." 
 
 In 1854 ne visited Belgium and Northern France. On 
 
OXFORD DAYS 13 
 
 this journey he made the acquaintance of some of the 
 noblest examples of Gothic architecture the world has to 
 show, and the impression made upon him by the superb 
 churches of Amiens, Beauvais, and Chartres was profound 
 and lasting. The following year Morris, Burne-Jones, and 
 Fulford went on a walking tour through Normandy, 
 revisiting some of the memorable places and making 
 many new acquaintances among the wonderful archi- 
 tecture of that country. But this journey was memo- 
 rable for another reason. The talks and impressions of 
 the tour found expression on the return journey in the 
 decision of Morris and Burne-Jones to abandon all ideas 
 of taking Holy Orders and henceforth to follow art. They 
 arrived at this conclusion one August night on the quay 
 at Havre. Burne-Jones was to be a painter, Morris an 
 architect. 
 
 Before the tour, however, Morris had discovered that he 
 could write. In the winter of 1854 he read Burne-Jones 
 his first poem. Of this event writes Canon Dixon : " One 
 night Crom Price and I went to Exeter and found him with 
 Burne-Jones. As soon as we entered the room Burne- 
 Jones exclaimed wildly, " He's a big poet ! " " Who 
 is?" asked we. "Why, Topsy!" This is the name, 
 sometimes shortened to Top, which had been given him 
 because of his wild curly hair. This first poem was called 
 " The Willow and the Red Cliff." His friends were full of 
 enthusiasm. " Well," said Morris, " if this is poetry, it is 
 very easy to write ; " and for some time afterwards he 
 presented his friend with a new poem almost daily. Later, 
 he found out that he could write prose, and he wrote 
 those prose romances which are unequalled in our language 
 for their luxuriant beauty of thought, magic of imagery, 
 and unique knowledge of medieval archaeology. 
 
 The Brotherhood had long wanted a medium for the ex- 
 pression of its aspirations, so with the financial aid of Morris 
 and the intellectual co-operation of kindred spirits in 
 Cambridge as well as Oxford, the " Oxford and Cambridge 
 Magazine " was founded in 1856, with Morris as editor, a 
 position he yielded to Fulford before the second number 
 appeared. Twelve monthly numbers in all were printed, 
 
i 4 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 when decreasing circulation forced them to discontinue 
 the magazine. The " Oxford and Cambridge Magazine," 
 however, stands with the Pre-Raphaelite magazine, 
 " The Germ," as one of the most notable products of a 
 new era in English literature. In its pages not only 
 appeared the earliest work of Morris, but three poems by 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with whose work and personality 
 the former had recently become acquainted. 
 
 Indeed, the incident which confirmed Morris and Burne- 
 Jones in their intentions of becoming artists, came about 
 through the latter's introduction to Rossetti at about this 
 time. Both, like most people who came within his sphere, 
 fell under the spell of this powerful and unique personality. 
 It gave a quality to the art of Burne-Jones which it never 
 lost, and it eventually drew Morris away from architecture, 
 as a profession, for ever. Morris articled himself to the 
 architect Street, and entered his office in Beaumont Street, 
 Oxford, in January, 1856. There he met Philip Webb, 
 who became a life-long friend and, through this connection, 
 Norman Shaw. It was these three men who inaugurated 
 the renaissance of domestic architecture in England. 
 
CHAPTER III. FROM CRAFTSMANSHIP TO SOCIALISM 
 
 MORRIS'S career as an architect was of short 
 duration, for before the first year was out he had 
 abandoned the profession for ever. But by this time he 
 had settled with Burne-Jones in London, having come up 
 when Street removed from Oxford. In 1857 the two 
 friends took the rooms at 17 Red Lion Square, which had 
 been occupied by Rossetti and Deverell in the early days 
 of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and this was to be their 
 home until the spring of 1859. Morris had before this been 
 drawn towards designing, and it was his early skill in that 
 art and his love of the craft-work of the Middle Ages, 
 coupled with the necessity of having to furnish their rooms, 
 that his life as the revolutionist of taste in domestic furni- 
 ture began. The crafts of cabinet-making and upholstery 
 had become so degraded that Morris could actually buy 
 nothing in keeping with his taste so his practical genius 
 came into play, and he had what he wanted made to his 
 own designs. To the rooms in Red Lion Square came 
 Rossetti, and in his commanding and irresistible way 
 added his genius to that of Morris and Burne-Jones in the 
 decoration of the furniture. 
 
 Morris now turned to painting and designing with all 
 his ardour. " In all illumination and work of that kind," 
 Rossetti wrote in 1856, " he is quite unrivalled by anything 
 modern I know." In 1857 he painted his first picture. 
 It was a subject in oils taken from the " Morte d' Arthur " ; 
 and in the same year he did his first and only picture in 
 water-colour, whilst staying with Dixon at Manchester. In 
 this year also Morris joined Rossetti in that high-spirited but 
 ill-considered scheme for the decoration of the ceiling of 
 the then new debating hall (now the library) of the Union 
 Society at Oxford. Rooms were taken at Oxford, and the 
 old friends of the Brotherhood pressed into the service. 
 
16 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Rossetti had also secured the help of Burne-Jones, Arthur 
 Hughes, Spencer Stanhope, Val Prinsep, and Hungerford 
 Pollen. After the decoration of the Hall was finished, 
 Morris remained at Oxford in rooms at 17 George Street, 
 where the painters and their friends had spent so many 
 happy hours during the work at the Union Hall. 
 
 Some of the happiest days of his life were spent in 
 London during the few months preceding the painting of 
 the Union Hall ceiling. He was one of the Rossetti circle, 
 which included all that was vital and capable in the art of 
 the period, coupled with enthusiasm and a picturesque 
 Bohemianism. In 1858 he painted " Queen Guenevere," 
 the only completed painting of his now known to be extant ; 
 and in the early months of the year his first volume of poems, 
 " The Defence of Guenevere," appeared. His stay in 
 Oxford, however, caused a break with this circle, although 
 he paid London periodical visits, and he visited France 
 twice that year, once with Faulkner and Webb in August, 
 rowing down the Seine from Paris in a boat imported from 
 Oxford, and on another occasion alone to buy manuscripts, 
 armour, ironwork, and enamel. But all this time, although 
 he painted diligently, his mind dwelt upon other things. 
 He gradually realized that the pursuit of a single art was 
 not for him. The idea of the relationship of all the arts 
 in the building, not only of houses beautiful but of cities 
 beautiful, was clamouring for expression. 
 
 His stay in Oxford at this time was probably not entirely 
 disinterested. In the long vacation of 1857 Rossetti and 
 Burne-Jones had become acquainted with a lady, one of 
 the daughters of Mr. Robert Burden, of Oxford, whose 
 remarkable beauty so strongly resembled the type familiar 
 to everybody now through Rossetti's pictures, that the 
 young painters persuaded her to sit to them. She at- 
 tracted William Morris in another way, and on 26 April, 
 1859, he and Jane Burden were married at the parish 
 church of St. Michael's, Oxford. The ceremony was per- 
 formed by Dixon, who had become curate of St. Mary's, 
 Lambeth, with Faulkner as best man, and Burne-Jones 
 and other friends present. This proved to be the closing 
 event in the life of the Oxford Brotherhood. 
 
FROM CRAFTSMANSHIP TO SOCIALISM if 
 
 William Morris and his wife settled in furnished rooms at 
 41 Great Ormond Street, London, during the building of their 
 new home at Upton, in Kent. Morris had combined his 
 ideas of a home with the most cherished ideas of his art and 
 life, and the result was not only the turning-point of his 
 own career, but the turning-point in the history of English 
 domestic architecture. For Just as he had found it 
 difficult, in fact, impossible, to furnish rooms from the 
 commercial furniture stores, he found it doubly impossible 
 to furnish a complete house to his taste, and his life-long 
 sense of the essential relationship between architecture and 
 decoration forced to the front the idea of building his own 
 house. 
 
 The house, called Red House, was duly built by Philip 
 Webb. It was an L-shaped building of two stories, with a 
 high-pitched roof of red tiles, " thus violating all the 
 contemporary canons of squareness, stucco, and slate." 
 The decorations were the work of Morris and his friends, 
 and most of the furniture was designed by Webb and 
 specially made under his instructions. They entered into 
 occupation of the house in 1860, with the full intention of 
 making it their permanent home, but owing to matters of 
 health they had to leave the beautiful house after having 
 spent in it the five happiest years of their life. It was here 
 that their two children, both girls, were born. 
 
 The building of Red House and the problems of decora- 
 tion and furniture it raised, coupled with Morris's deepening 
 interest in craftsmanship, ultimately resulted in the founda- 
 tion of the epoch-making firm of Morris and Co. The original 
 members of the firm were William Morris, Philip Webb, 
 C. J. Faulkner, Ford Madox Brown, Burne- Jones, Rossetti, 
 P. P. Marshall, a surveyor and sanitary engineer, and 
 Arthur Hughes, who withdrew from the company before 
 the firm was registered. Premises were taken at No. 8 Red 
 Lion Square, near to Morris and Burne-Jones's old rooms, 
 and business started in April, 1861, under the title of 
 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Co., with a capital of one 
 hundred pounds, borrowed from Mrs. Morris the elder, and 
 a call of one pound per share from each member of the 
 company. 
 
i8 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 The object of the firm was to make and supply every- 
 thing that was needed in the decoration and furnishing 
 of a house, as well as such luxurious things as jewellery ; 
 but in the early days of its existence more attention was 
 paid to ecclesiastical decoration. Thus began the revival 
 of the crafts in England, and that revolution in architecture 
 and decoration which is still going on. In this concern 
 the immense energy of Morris had full play, and he rapidly 
 developed into a complete craftsman, who could turn his 
 hand with masterly effect to any kind of work. Gradually 
 the whole initiative of the firm devolved upon him 
 and, with the gradual secession of the partners, the 
 business came entirely into his hands. In 1865, when 
 the Morrises were forced to give up their beautiful 
 Red House, they took the house No. 26 Queen Square, 
 and to this place, for the sake of convenience and 
 economy, the business of Morris and Co. was removed 
 from Red Lion Square. Later, a show-room in Oxford 
 Street, and a workshop at Merton Abbey (both still occupied 
 by the proprietors of the firm), were taken. 
 
 In 1871, by a happy chance, he was able to take that 
 beautiful house on a backwater of the Upper Thames, 
 which was to be his beloved country home for the next 
 twenty-five years. He had been living with growing dis- 
 content in Bloomsbury, when he came across an advertise- 
 ment of Kelmscott Manor House in an estate agent's list. It 
 was such a house as must have occupied his dreams. It lies 
 on a little stream at the end of the remote and ancient village 
 of Kelmscott, in Oxfordshire, some three miles by field-path 
 and winding cart-road from Lechlade ; an irregular cluster 
 of grey gables, with mullioned and small-leaded windows and 
 tiled roofs of the same colour as the buildings, with the 
 tiles beautifully graded like the scales of a fish, and all 
 overgrown with golden lichen, blending wonderfully with 
 the varied greens of the creepers, the trees, and the great 
 dark yew hedge which dominates the gardens. Morris loved 
 this old house, which blended so well with his life and ideals, 
 and he has celebrated it in perfect prose in the final chapter 
 of " News from Nowhere." 
 
 He saw little of Kelmscott during the first year of his 
 
FROM CRAFTSMANSHIP TO SOCIALISM 19 
 
 tenancy, which was jointly held by him and Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti. The previous year he had finished " The 
 Earthly Paradise," and he had been waiting to get this off 
 his hands before taking a long- contemplated trip to Iceland. 
 Next to his love of the medieval crafts, the buildings and 
 countryside of Southern England and Northern France, 
 there was nothing which attracted him more completely than 
 the Sagas of Scandinavia and the virile lives of the people 
 of the North. The proposed journey to Iceland filled 
 him with boyish delight, and it is recounted by the children 
 of Burne- Jones how he came one day and practised the 
 life of a backwoodsman by building in their garden a stove 
 of loose bricks over which he cooked a stew. He and three 
 friends, including Mr. Eirikr Magmisson, who afterwards 
 collaborated with him in translating the Icelandic Sagas, 
 left for Iceland in July, 1871, and he arrived back in 
 England again towards the end of September. A second 
 journey to Iceland was made in 1873. 
 
 The next few years were occupied with the business of 
 " the firm," and with translations of the smaller Icelandic 
 Sagas and the ^Eneids of Virgil, with the writing of " Love 
 is Enough " and ' ' Sigurd the Volsung," and with the craft of 
 writing and decorating books on vellum. Of these he 
 produced many beautiful specimens, including copies of 
 some of his own poems and translations, and Fitzgerald's 
 version of "The Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam. He had 
 taken a small house at Turnham Green, and between 
 this and the workshops in Queen's Square and Kelmscott 
 Manor House he spent most of his time. Besides this he 
 found time to go down to Leek, in Staffordshire, to learn 
 the craft of dyeing and to revive the manufacture of honest 
 and durable dyes, Strained relations had existed for some 
 time among the members of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, 
 and Co., and the partnership was dissolved in March, 1875, 
 Morris becoming the sole proprietor of the concern, which 
 since then has been carried on under the name of Morris 
 and Co. Constant friction had existed between Morris and 
 Rossetti before this, and the latter had finally left Kelm- 
 scott, to Morris's great relief, in the preceding summer. 
 The attachment between these two dominant personalities 
 
20 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 was completely broken over the transactions connected 
 with the dissolution. 
 
 William Morris had never followed, or dreamt of follow- 
 ing, the reclusive life of the man of letters, and even less did 
 he anticipate the unsecluded but more private career 
 of the business man. Literature was always a by-product 
 of a life that constantly tended towards expression and 
 consummation in the broader current of social affairs. 
 The firm of Morris and Co. was not a business, it was a 
 social movement. His art meant nothing to him, unless 
 it bore a direct relationship with the life around him. 
 In the broadest possible manner he was a Socialist, 
 and his Socialism, long before it became a conscious 
 political aim, found expression in the essential communal 
 spirit of his demand for a revival of handicraft, in the 
 Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which he 
 founded in 1877, and in the enthusiasm and money he 
 threw into the Eastern Questions Association at about 
 the same time. 
 
 In 1878 he took the old Georgian house on the Upper 
 Mall, Hammersmith, which he renamed Kelmscott House, 
 and which he occupied until his death. Many of his 
 activities had their centre here. In one of the rooms he 
 set up a loom, where he taught himself the art of weaving 
 in his spare time. The house was decorated by him 
 throughout, and many of the treasures of the Red House 
 found a resting-place here. Later, when he Joined the 
 Socialist Movement, the coach-house was turned into a 
 lecture hall for the use of the Hammersmith Socialist 
 Society. He loved to think that the broad river which 
 flowed past his windows was the same Thames that lapped 
 the meadows of his beautiful Manor House 130 miles above 
 Hammersmith, and occasionally he would charter a boat 
 and take his family and some friends by water to Kelmscott. 
 
 Morris's workshops and his public life seemed to grow 
 side by side. The constant addition of departments 
 made it necessary to look for larger premises for the work- 
 shops, and these were eventually found at Merton Abbey, 
 in Surrey. This growth of the business was forced upon 
 him by reason of his inability to procure the quality of 
 
FROM CRAFTSMANSHIP TO SOCIALISM 21 
 
 material demanded by him from ordinary manufacturers. 
 In this way Morris and Co. grew from a firm of decorators 
 into a firm of craftsmen, making stained glass, tapestry, 
 carpets, embroidery, tiles, furniture, printed cotton goods, 
 waU papers, furniture velvets, and other fabrics and up- 
 holstery. Practically the same causes drove him forth as a 
 lecturer. He lectured on art and handicraft and the 
 preservation of ancient buildings, not only in London, but 
 in many provincial towns ; and in 1882 he gave evidence 
 before the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction. 
 Still, during this period William Morris led a life that 
 would have been lonely had it not been so fully con- 
 centrated upon his work and his ideas. He was at the 
 parting of the ways with many of his old habits and 
 associates. Hitherto what political activity he had dis- 
 played was connected with the National Liberal League, 
 but in the early 'eighties he was more and more drawn 
 towards Socialism, until on 13 January, 1883, on the same 
 day on which his old college at Oxford had unanimously 
 elected him to an honorary fellowship, he joined the 
 Democratic Federation which had recently been formed 
 for the propagation of Socialism. 
 
CHAPTER IV. LAST YEARS 
 
 HE looked upon his acceptance of Socialism as an act 
 of renunciation. His membership card, which was 
 endorsed by H. H. Champion, bore the legend, " William 
 Morris, designer." He was henceforth a workman and not 
 a member of the middle class. He worked hard for the 
 Federation, lecturing all over England, contributing both 
 literature and funds to "Justice," its official organ; and 
 in May 1883 he was elected a member of its Executive 
 Committee. 
 
 This went on for two years, when differences as to 
 policy brought about a split with Hyndman. Morris 
 formed the Socialist League in 1884 with an organ of its 
 own, called "The Commonweal," which he ran himself, 
 and to which he contributed, besides other matter, " The 
 Dream of John Ball " and " News from Nowhere." The 
 League prospered for many years, and in spite of many 
 differences with his fellow - members, Morris remained 
 a member until 1890, and managed " The Commonweal " 
 until he was deposed in 1889. 
 
 But some years previous to these events he had been 
 drawn again more intimately into literature and art. 
 In 1887 he published his translation of the " Odyssey," 
 and in 1889 the two first of his prose romances, " The House 
 of the Wolfings " and "The Roots of the Mountains." The 
 example of his work at Merton Abbey had been having its 
 effect upon many young artists and craftsmen, and he 
 eventually threw his energies into the Arts and Crafts 
 Movement as organized by such men as Walter Crane, 
 Professor Lethaby, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, Emery 
 Walker, and others. He joined the Art Worker's Guild, 
 and afterwards the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, 
 became less and less a militant Socialist, and devoted 
 
LAST YEARS 23 
 
 most of his lectures purely to questions of art in relation to 
 industry and life in general. 
 
 In 1890 "The Story of the Glittering Plain" appeared 
 in the " English Illustrated Magazine," and " News from 
 Nowhere " was issued in paper covers for one shilling. 
 In the same year Morris busied himself with what was to 
 be the final work of his active and productive life the 
 Kelmscott Press. His love of beautiful books found ex- 
 pression, as all his desires did sooner or later, in the wish to 
 produce beautiful books. He secured the co-operation of 
 Mr. Emery Walker and Mr. T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, and 
 designed types and initials and ornaments, and by the be- 
 ginning of 1891 the Kelmscott Press was established in 
 premises on the Upper Mall, Hammersmith, just above 
 Kelmscott House. The first book printed on the press was 
 Morris's own " Story of the Glittering Plain." 
 
 Almost coincidental with the establishment of the 
 Kelmscott Press the signs of the illness, which was to have 
 a fatal termination five years later, appeared. That 
 summer he went for a short tour in Northern France with 
 his daughter Jenny, and in the autumn he commenced 
 publishing his translations of the Icelandic Sagas. The 
 remaining years of his life were full of the old activity. 
 He fought for the causes he had at heart and worked un- 
 ceasingly. He protested against the restorations at 
 Peterborough Cathedral, St. Mark's, Venice, and the 
 taming of Epping Forest. Several journeys were taken 
 to the provinces for the purpose of lectures, and another 
 trip to Northern France. 
 
 But most of the time of these last years was occupied 
 with the Kelmscott Press. This was his last, and in many 
 ways his greatest, enthusiasm. Masterpiece by masterpiece 
 fell from the great press as his years ebbed out, and in the 
 spare hours of their superintendence he wrote prose 
 romances. On the death of Tennyson, in 1892, he was 
 approached by a member of Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet in 
 reference to the vacant Laureatship. William Morris 
 was pleased with the implied honour, but he made it quite 
 clear that he could not accept such an office. He spoke a 
 few words at the funeral of the Socialist, Sergius Stepniak, 
 
24 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 in 1894, and in January of the following year he spoke 
 for the last time in public at a meeting of the Society 
 for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising. 
 
 The two most important works of these last months of 
 his life were the completion of the Kelmscott "Chaucer," 
 which had been in process of construction in one way and 
 another for some five years, and which had been a year and 
 nine months in printing, and his last prose romance, 
 " The Sundering Flood." Each was strangely typical of 
 his life and his impending end. His whole career was a 
 practical embodiment of the spirit and task of the period 
 of Chaucer, and his poems were, in more ways than one, 
 a modern reflection of the genius of the " Canterbury 
 Pilgrims." The Chaucer was finished on 2 June, 1896, 
 and two copies were ready for him on his return from 
 Sussex, where he had been spending a few days in search of 
 health with his friend Mr. Wilfrid Blunt. One of these 
 copies was for himself, the other for his life-long friend 
 Burne- Jones, who had contributed eighty-seven pictures 
 to the great book. 
 
 His health grew rapidly worse, and the splendid energy 
 of the craftsman and poet began to flag. A voyage to the 
 North Cape was advised and taken. He left London on 
 22 July, and arrived back at Tilbury on 18 August. The 
 voyage had done no good, and his one desire now was to 
 get away to Kelmscott. But he was never to see his 
 beautiful country home again. His illness took a serious 
 turn, and he went to Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, 
 where he died on the morning of Saturday, 3 October. 
 
 On 6 October he was buried in the little churchyard 
 of Kelmscott. It was a bright, windy day following a 
 night of storm. The roads were strewn with leaves, and 
 the orchards with fallen apples. The coffin was borne 
 from Lechlade station upon one of the Kelmscott farm 
 wagons. There was no display of mourning for this man 
 who had lived so worthily and worked so well. The farm 
 wagon was one of the yellow-bodied, red-wheeled vehicles 
 of the locality ; it was wreathed with vine and willow and 
 carpeted with green moss, and the unpolished oak coffin, 
 with its handles of wrought iron, was covered with a 
 
LAST YEARS 25 
 
 treasured piece of Broussa brocade, upon which was laid a 
 wreath of bay. " With the family and friends," writes 
 Mr. J. W. Mackail, " were mingled workmen from Merton 
 Abbey and Oxford Street, comrades of the Socialist League, 
 pupils of the Art Worker's Guild, and Kelmscott villagers 
 in their working dress. There was no pomp of organized 
 mourning, and the ceremony was of the shortest and 
 simplest. Among the associates and followers of later 
 years were the few survivors of that remarkable fellowship 
 which had founded the Oxford Brotherhood and the firm 
 of Red Lion Square ; and at the head of the grave Sir 
 Edward Burne- Jones, the closest and the first friend of all, 
 stood and saw a great part of his own life lowered into 
 earth." 
 
CHAPTER V. CRAFTSMANSHIP 
 
 I. THE IDEA OF HANDICRAFT 
 
 THE position occupied by William Morris among the 
 great men of the last century was that of one who 
 accepted the intimation of an inner vision of beauty and 
 used it as a challenge to the triumphant ugliness of the day. 
 By that vision he threw down the gage, and ever afterwards 
 carried on a kind of holy warfare in favour of joy and 
 beauty. He saw the drab chaos of our big towns and the 
 dull lives led by their vast populations, and he strove to 
 show how it was possible for men to work happily together 
 and to make the products of their hands both seemly and 
 useful. He saw that men took no joy of their work, and 
 little pleasure in the things they made. There was no 
 depth or fine quality to life, and no margin to the page of 
 existence. All experiences were treated in deference to 
 mercenary standards, and it was asked of all things not 
 whether they were good or useful or beautiful, but whether 
 they were marketable. Without this last they were ignored. 
 Yet, in the midst of it all, he saw that men wanted leisure, 
 and that the senses of decency and beauty were not dead, 
 but merely stunted through long disuse. 
 
 The war he waged was not a war of destruction. He 
 sought to vanquish a sordid and ugly world by building up 
 a generous and beautiful one. Beautiful things were to be 
 made that would in themselves change the world, that 
 would not only be so beautiful as to give significance to 
 their mean and ugly surroundings, but that would have the 
 effect of making men feel this meanness and desire to undo 
 it. By virtue of a rare imagination, coupled with tireless 
 practical and administrative ability, he made the re- 
 naissance of such beauty a possibility, and although he 
 
CRAFTSMANSHIP 27 
 
 did not live to see more than the merest practical be- 
 ginnings of his life-work, the seeds sown by him must 
 increase and multiply until they realize the Utopia of his 
 dreams. 
 
 William Morris was Ruskin in practice. He never 
 claimed originality for his ideas, and was never weary of 
 owning John Ruskin as his master. Rarely has human 
 being possessed the ability of expression in so many forms. 
 He will be remembered as the motive force behind a number 
 of activities, each of which gained in power and beauty by 
 association with the magic of his personality. But 
 although his work was in many forms, it represented a 
 decided and homogeneous whole, closely and intimately 
 related with his ideals of a new social order. Without 
 this organic relationship between his art and his ideas, 
 those beautiful productions which bear the mark of his 
 genius are no more than the objects of any fashion of 
 a moment. Whether as weaver or decorator, printer 
 or painter, his work is a constant and deliberate pro- 
 test against cheapness, and an assertion of the principle 
 of production for use against the prevalent one of pro- 
 duction for profit. It is an appeal to society to take up 
 the half-forgotten traditions of the pre-commercial age, to 
 go back for its ideals to an age which was interested in 
 what it made, not because of any monetary profit that 
 might accrue therefrom, but because it desired what it 
 produced for its own use, and took a sane joy in the 
 effort of making things that were to be a part of its dairy 
 life. 
 
 The avowed aim of Morris as a craftsman was to apply 
 and amplify the principles of art laid down by Ruskin in 
 the chapter of " The Stones of Venice " called " The Nature 
 of Gothic." He considered that essay one of the most 
 important of its author's works, and "one of the very few 
 necessary and inevitable utterances of the century." 
 The essence of its teaching was the principle that art 
 is the expression of man's joy in his work. At the same 
 time the theories of Morris were not entirely derived from 
 Ruskin ; he was derivative only in the sense of having 
 been awakened to the main bent of his genius by the 
 
28 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 teachings of Ruskin. There was an affinity between the 
 two men which was, quite naturally, first revealed by the 
 elder. This affinity was almost complete, but it broke 
 down in one essential. Morris, " born out of his due time," 
 as he cried, child of the Middle Ages as he undoubtedly was, 
 was yet never so consistent a medievalist as Ruskin. He 
 would go back to the Middle Ages with him for the lost 
 traditions of art, but beyond that his medievalism did not 
 go. Ruskin's love of even the best days of Feudalism 
 did not convince Morris of the desirability of their revival. 
 The traditions of art lay in the past, but the traditions of 
 society In the future. Ruskin called himself a Tory of the 
 old type ; Morris was a Socialist. 
 
 Morris based his theory that art was the expression of 
 man's joy in his work, on his own desire for happiness, 
 which he could not help believing was a universal desire. 
 He argued that his life was under the influence of two 
 dominating moods, which he called the mood of energy 
 and the mood of idleness. These two moods, now one, 
 then the other, were always crying out to be satisfied. The 
 mood of energy could only be satisfied by action, that of 
 idleness by memory of pleasurable experiences, of things, 
 or places. He found also that whilst the mood of idleness 
 amused him, that of energy gave him hope. And he 
 believed that all men's lives were compounded of these 
 two moods. From this he deduced that the aim of art was 
 to administer to these moods, first by giving men pleasurable 
 means for the expression of their energy, and by thus pro- 
 ducing beautiful things giving them worthy objects for 
 joy in idleness. Further, he says : 
 
 " I believe that art cannot be the result of external 
 compulsion ; the labour which goes to produce it is 
 voluntary, and partly undertaken for the labour itself, 
 partly for the sake of the hope of producing something 
 which, when done, shall give pleasure to the users of it. 
 Or, again, this extra labour, when it is extra, is undertaken 
 with the aim of satisfying that mood of energy by employing 
 it to produce something worth doing, and which, therefore, 
 will keep before the worker a lively hope while he is working, 
 and also by giving it work to do in which there is absolute 
 
CRAFTSMANSHIP 29 
 
 immediate pleasure. Perhaps it is difficult to explain to 
 the non-artistic capacity that this definite sensuous pleasure 
 is always pleasant in the handicraft work of the deft work- 
 man when he is working successfully, and that it increases 
 in proportion to the freedom and individuality of the work. 
 Also, you must understand that this production of art, and 
 consequent pleasure in work, is not confined to the pro- 
 duction of matters which are works of art only, like pictures, 
 statues, and so forth, but has been and should be a part of 
 all labour in some form or other : so only will the claims 
 of the mood of energy be satisfied. 
 
 " Therefore the aim of art is to increase the happiness 
 of men, by giving them beauty and interest of incident to 
 amuse their leisure, and prevent them wearying even of 
 rest, and by giving them hope and bodily pleasure in their 
 work ; or, shortly, to make man's work happy and his 
 rest fruitful."* 
 
 The essential qualities of art were decoration and design. 
 The form itself was to be beautiful in so far as its design 
 accorded with Nature. It must not only look as if it had, 
 as it were, grown under man's hands, but also that it could 
 go on growing ; or, rather, that it would neither impede 
 nor ever look out of place amidst that " constant state of 
 becoming " which is life. Decoration was the final ex- 
 pression of the artist's appreciation of, and happiness in, 
 his work under these conditions, and the expression of 
 his desire to give others pleasure in the work of his hands. 
 " To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce 
 use, that is the great office of decoration ; to give people 
 pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the 
 use of it."f 
 
 The acceptance of this theory rules out of court for all 
 time the prevalent tendencies towards the separation of 
 art from the common current of life. It turns art from 
 a private into a public, from an exclusive into a popular 
 thing. And it invites, nay, necessitates, the happy co- 
 operation of the whole community in its production. 
 
 * "Signs of Change" (1888), p. 121. 
 
 f "Hopes and Fears for Art" (1882), p. 4. 
 
30 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Art must become, as it was at one time, architectonic, or, 
 in other words, organically related and subservient to the 
 master-craft of architecture. Morris had no sympathy 
 with any art which did not fall under this law. The only 
 genuine art was applied art. Every art product must have 
 some definite relationship with the house and the public 
 building. Painting was more and more to take its place 
 as an adjunct to architecture ; it was to become mural, 
 putting the final touches to the builder's work in glowing 
 frescoes. Sculpture was to be the blossoming in folia- 
 tion and figure of the stonework of homestead, workshop, 
 or meeting-place. These were parts of the decorative 
 expression of the artist's work. Just as he would 
 decorate the surface of a cup or a vase, a woven 
 fabric or a printed cloth. He carried his love of ap- 
 plied art even into music, in which he showed no interest 
 except in the form of folk-song and old church music, 
 where harmony and melody are woven into labours and 
 devotions of the people. 
 
 But if art were to render superfluous the maker of refined 
 and useless things, bric-a-brac, articles of vertu, platform 
 music, and easel pictures, it would more certainly limit 
 the mechanic and the machine to reducing the drudgery of 
 life to a minimum. Instead of the artist, as we now under- 
 stand him, living a pampered or neglected life according 
 to the measure of success he has obtained in making things 
 which are complete in themselves and bearing only the 
 slightest relationship to the activities of life, we shall have 
 the craftsman. He will make things for use, which shall be 
 so beautiful that any ornaments apart from them will be 
 unnecessary. But the craftsman will not be an exclusive 
 person like the artist ; he will be the common worker, no 
 longer the slave of a machine, but taking a joy in the work 
 of his hands into which he weaves his vision of the world, 
 and by which he expresses and interprets the wonder 
 and mystery of life. 
 
 William Morris realized fully the tendency of modern 
 society to standardize all production, and he rightly saw 
 in this fact the destruction, not of happiness alone, but of 
 individuality. The artist has become the dependent of a 
 
CRAFTSMANSHIP 31 
 
 few powerful persons ; he ministers to their exclusive tastes, 
 whilst the great body of the people toil at the duplication of 
 utilities which are largely rendered useless and dangerous 
 by imitation and adulteration. Morris demanded for each 
 individual the right to express his own personality in the 
 things he makes, and he looked upon the factory and the 
 machine as tyrants, as dangerous as the owners of slaves, 
 the destruction of individuality being as great in each case. 
 His gospel of work is a demand for the freedom of personal 
 expression. In his own words : 
 
 " The hope of pleasure in the work itself : how strange 
 that hope must seem to some of my readers to most of 
 them ! Yet I think that to all living things there is a 
 pleasure in the exercise of their energies, and that even 
 beasts rejoice in being lithe and swift and strong. But a 
 man at work, making something which he feels will exist 
 because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the 
 energies of his mind and soul as well as his body. Memory 
 and imagination help him as he works. Not only his own 
 thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide 
 his hands ; and, as a part of the human race, he creates. 
 If we work thus we shall be men, and our days will be happy 
 and eventful." 
 
 Throughout his life this view of art was a part of his 
 very existence. It wove itself into his imagination as he 
 roamed the hornbeam glades of Epping Forest as a child ; 
 it filled him with wonder, later on, at Marlborough College, 
 when he devoted hours, usually spent in play or study, to 
 the contemplation of the medieval survivals in the architec- 
 ture of that neighbourhood; and later, when he found 
 opportunities of visiting Normandy and Flanders, the 
 wonders of craftsmanship in Rouen, in Amiens, and in 
 Bruges deepened still more his consciousness of the need 
 for a renaissance of art co-operate with work. His intense 
 love and deep understanding of medieval architecture and 
 craftsmanship can be traced through all his writings, from 
 their beginnings in his imaginative contributions to the 
 " Oxford and Cambridge Magazine," in 1856, down through 
 poem, romance, and essay, to the inspiring practical 
 lectures of his later years lectures given to art workers 
 
32 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 in London, Birmingham, Burslem, and elsewhere, to the 
 Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and to 
 innumerable Socialist and Reform organizations all over 
 the country. 
 
 The dominant note in all these impressions and utterances 
 is the high value he sets upon the work produced under the 
 Guilds of the Middle Ages. The craft-guilds represented 
 a constant growth towards the control of labour under 
 the most sincere and honest conditions known to history, 
 and, down to their hour of supremacy in the begin- 
 ning of the fourteenth century, they were quite demo- 
 cratic in constitution. There were no mere journeymen, 
 and apprentices were sure, as a matter of course, to take 
 their places as masters of the craft when they had learned 
 it. William Morris, however, never actually advocated 
 the restoration of the guild system, although there Is no 
 doubt that he would in a large measure have supported 
 the claims for some such restoration of craft organization 
 as that advocated more recently by Mr. A. J. Penty in his 
 much- discussed book on that subject.* 
 
 The three main arguments advanced by Morris in favour 
 of the mediaeval tradition in production in addition 
 to the insistence laid by the guilds upon soundness 
 of material and deftness of craftsmanship, were : (i) 
 Absence of division of labour ; giving the craftsman 
 an interest in the actual and complete article he was 
 making, instead of, as nowadays, in only one part of it, 
 as for instance in, say, the making of tables, where the 
 craftsman of the past would be a maker of actual tables 
 and not, like his descendant, the modern cabinet-maker, a 
 maker of one part of a table. Or, again, in the making of 
 boots, where the division of labour is emphasized in the fact 
 that in the ordinary factory-made boot no worker makes 
 the complete article ; some devote their lives to making 
 " uppers," others to fitting these on to the " soles," and 
 so forth. Under such conditions there can be no full 
 interest, and therefore no pleasure in the final form of an 
 
 * " The Restoration of the Gild System." By Arthur J. 
 Penty. 1906. 
 
CRAFTSMANSHIP 33 
 
 article. The worker is robbed of the joy that follows his 
 consciousness of the organic relationship of the results 
 of his labour, and his work deteriorates accordingly. 
 (2) The direct relationship between craftsman and consumer ; 
 the craftsman, being thus enabled to consider the personal 
 needs of his customer, and so to weave into his labour the 
 pleasure of the ultimate user with that of his own pleasure 
 as maker of the article. (3) The local nature of craftsman- 
 ship ; that is, the production in one district, or one 
 country, of all articles that the resources of the locality 
 make practicable. Thus saving cost of transport, and 
 adding to the personality of the craftsman the distinction 
 of environment. It was these three incidents of crafts- 
 manship which gave in a large measure the beauty, 
 the naturalness, and the wonderful proportion to the 
 objects produced under the guilds of the Middle Ages. 
 Speaking of the breaking up of this system, Morris 
 said : 
 
 " What I wish you chiefly to note and remember is 
 this, that the men of the Renaissance lent all their energies, 
 consciously or unconsciously, to the severance of art from 
 the daily lives of men, and that they brought it to pass, if 
 not utterly in their own days, yet speedily and certainly. 
 I must remind you, though I, and better men than I, 
 have said it over and over again, that once every man that 
 made anything made it a work of art besides a useful piece 
 of goods, whereas now only a very few things have even 
 the most distant claim to be considered works of art. I 
 beg you to consider that most carefully and seriously, and 
 to try to think what it means. But first, lest any of you 
 doubt it, let me ask you what forms the great mass of the 
 objects that fill our museums, setting aside positive 
 pictures and sculpture ? Is it not just the common 
 household goods of past time ? True it is that some people 
 may look upon them simply as curiosities, but you and I 
 have been taught most properly to look upon them as 
 priceless treasures that can teach us all sorts of things, 
 and yet, I repeat, they are for the most part common 
 household goods, wrought by ' common fellows,' as people 
 say now, without any cultivation, men who thought 
 
34 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 the sun went round the earth, and that Jerusalem was 
 exactly in the middle of the world." * 
 
 The lesson William Morris would have us learn from a 
 fragment of domestic crockery handed down to us from 
 those remote days, when " common " men built the great 
 minsters, and the noble manor houses, and simple, yet 
 dignified cottages of England, is that it was the same 
 spirit which guided alike the hand and brain of the 
 potter as that which moved the masons to pile stone on 
 stone and build edifices which are still the glory and 
 pleasure of mankind. The household utensil, no less than 
 the great east window of York Minster ; the tapestry in 
 the baronial hall, no less than the many-coloured walls of 
 St. Mark's at Venice, were but parts of one great popular 
 art. The aim of Morris was to co-ordinate and give 
 modern significance to that art. 
 
 A true architectural work was not the mere walls and 
 roof of a building as we understand that word, but a build- 
 ing provided with all the necessary furniture, and decorated 
 according to the quality and nature of the structure. 
 Further than this, architecture was the great composite 
 art which expressed both man's value of life and made 
 life of value to him. His history was worked into its very 
 stones, his traditions and attainments were recorded in its 
 decorations. Every building erected in the true spirit of 
 architecture was the expression of the aspirations and 
 needs of the race. But to have this true spirit it must 
 have been founded on the happy work of the most useful 
 part of the population. And work as he did towards a 
 rehabilitation of this essential spirit, Morris was under no 
 illusion as to the practicability of its revival under present 
 commercial conditions. What he advocated, what he 
 worked for, was the renaissance of the spirit of Gothic art, 
 and that, in his own words, could only come about in its 
 completeness, " as a part of a change as wide and deep 
 as that which destroyed Feudalism." 
 
 * "Art and the Beauty of the Earth " (1881), p. n. 
 
CHAPTER VI CRAFTSMANSHIP. 
 2. THE REVIVAL OF HANDICRAFT. 
 
 SUCH is the theory behind the immense productiveness 
 of William Morris as a craftsman. It is an extremely 
 significant thing that his first practical efforts in the 
 direction of reviving organic and homogeneous art, were 
 forced upon him by his absolute inability to purchase any 
 household necessities of modern manufacture worthy to 
 be placed within the walls of the Red House which he had 
 built for himself at Upton. Characteristically the needs 
 of that house were the beginnings of a revolution, not only 
 in furniture and decoration, but in the conditions of labour 
 under which these things were made. But earlier than 
 the building of the Red House, Morris had grown dis- 
 satisfied with art divorced from architecture. He had 
 started to paint pictures under the influence of Rossetti 
 and the Pre-Raphaelites, but after a little while he realized 
 that the production of pictures apart from design related 
 to handicraft, would have been as idle a thing as if he were 
 to have devoted his life entirely to writing poetry. 
 
 His mind had been fired by Ruskin, and his imagination 
 by the great organic art of the Middle Ages, so that, with 
 one of his great energy and practical genius, the need for a 
 house was but an opportunity for giving actual form to his 
 previously established tastes. Morris knew quite well 
 the difficulties in the way of furnishing a house in this 
 manner. He and Burne- Jones had had a foretaste of them 
 when furnishing their rooms in Red Lion Square. But he 
 was a " dreamer of dreams," who was not content with the 
 mere vision. No vision, howsoever beautiful in itself, 
 satisfied William Morris. He was never happy unless he 
 was turning his dreams into realities. Romantic as he 
 was, the end of his romance was always practical power. 
 
 That movement, which has come to be known as the 
 
36 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Ats and Crafts Movement, first became conscious of itself 
 during the building of the Red House by Morris and Philip 
 Webb. The next step was the establishment of the firm 
 which is now known as Morris and Company. This move 
 was not actually initiated by Morris, but sprang out of the 
 conversations of his circle, the painter, Ford Madox Brown, 
 being probably the first to suggest the actual idea of an 
 establishment for the sale of products made under the new 
 conditions. But it was soon realized that the energy and 
 initiative of the enterprise came from Morris who, as we 
 have seen, eventually became the sole proprietor of the 
 concern. The revival of handicraft attracted many young 
 artists, and in a few years there were craftsmen working 
 in various parts of London and the provinces, and these 
 afterwards organized or joined handicraft guilds and 
 societies for the promotion of their work. William Morris, 
 however, was not a promoter of any of these organizations, 
 aUhough he was one of the first members (and afterwards 
 a master) of the Art Workers' Guild, founded in 1884, and 
 of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded in 1888, 
 into both of which he threw his energies and enthusiasms 
 along with such men as Walter Crane, T. J. Cobden- 
 Sanderson, Emery Walker, Professor W. R. Lethaby, 
 Heywood Sumner, and his old friend William de Morgan. 
 But his chief work for the handicraft movement lay in 
 his craftsmanship ; it lay indeed in the propaganda value 
 of the simple, but rare, fact that he practised what he 
 preached. The need for good design being recognized, 
 he did not content himself with the mere advocacy of good 
 design, he made himself a good designer. And just in the 
 same way he taught himself craft after craft ; and in some 
 instances he had not only to revive an almost lost art, but 
 he had to learn how to make the materials of the art, 
 because none could be found that were free from the blight 
 of adulteration. A good instance of this was in his re- 
 vival of the craft of weaving, when, being unable to buy 
 durable dyes, he went down to Leek, in Staffordshire, and 
 worked at the vats until he produced what he wanted. 
 This power of application and concentration made of him 
 the most unique and varied craftsman perhaps of all time. 
 
CRAFTSMANSHIP 37 
 
 For, of the numerous crafts connected with the business of 
 Morris and Company, there was not one of which he 
 did not understand the theory and, in most cases, the 
 practice also. 
 
 The rich colourings of his fabrics, with their beautiful 
 and strong design ; his tapestries, stained glass, wall-papers, 
 chintzes, no less than the noble books of the Kelmscott 
 Press, have all been epoch-making in their own ways. 
 And although Morris dwelt so much in the past and sought 
 so much to link up modern craftsmanship with that of the 
 Middle Ages, his work is in no sense imitative. He was 
 never a copyist. His design and the quality of his products 
 followed the medieval tradition only in spirit. They are 
 a continuation, a development of the handicrafts of that 
 period, a continuation full of that capacity for growth 
 which marked all its works. In a lecture delivered before 
 the Trades' Guild of Learning, in 1877, speaking of ancient 
 art he said, " Let us study it wisely, be taught by it, 
 kindled by it ; all the while determining not to imitate 
 or repeat it ; to have either no art at all, or an art which 
 we have made our own." Morris not only gave but followed 
 this advice. He went to the Middle Ages, to the Craft 
 Masters of the great guilds for instruction and for inspira- 
 tion, but he learnt from them how to make an art of his 
 own, just as they had made an art for themselves. 
 
 The modern craftsman differed from the craftsman of 
 the past in one particular way. He was more conscious 
 of his art. His work has not that simplicity, that naivete 
 which characterizes so much of the work of the ages which 
 had not ceased to wonder at the world. This was inevit- 
 able in the deliberate reformer. But although Morris did 
 what he did with full consciousness of the object and meaning 
 of his work, his consciousness was too great ever to become 
 a pose or a mannerism. He saw the philosophic bearings 
 between his art and life so clearly that had such a vision 
 been possible to the Middle Ages, capitalism might never 
 have been born, and Morris would not have had to plead 
 with his age In strong and beautiful English words for the 
 re-acceptance of art in daily life : 
 
 " If you accept it, it must be part of our daily lives, and 
 
38 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 the daily life of every man. It will be with us wherever 
 we go, in the ancient city, full of traditions of past time, 
 in the newly-cleared farm in America or the Colonies, 
 where no man has dwelt for traditions to gather round him ; 
 in the quiet countryside as in the busy town, no place shall 
 be without it. You will have it with you in your sorrow 
 as in your joy, in your work-a-day hours as in your leisure. 
 It shall be no respecter of persons, but be shared by gentle 
 and simple, learned and unlearned, and be as 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 goodwill, fair dealing, and confi- 
 dence 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 the best gift 
 that the world has ever had."* 
 
 * Art and the Beauty of the Earth (1881), p. 16. 
 
CHAPTER VII. SOCIALISM 
 
 NOBODY who reads Professor J. W. Mackail's " Life 
 of William Morris " can fail to realize that his whole 
 career was a progress towards Socialism. It can be traced 
 in. his tastes and in his habits. On the one hand, in his love 
 of the products of those societies which were based least 
 upon slave labour, and on the other, in his temperamental 
 sense of fellowship, which in his early years coloured his un- 
 fulfilled dreams of a monastic life. And again, the plaintive 
 note of his earlier poems, even down to " The Earthly 
 Paradise," is not always confined, as in most " aesthetic " 
 poetry, to vague regrets at the evanescence of earthly joys 
 and the hopelessness of mortal desires, but its complaint 
 is against the ugliness and pain of the life he saw around 
 him. 
 
 Morris had the temperament of a Socialist. His ultimate 
 acceptance of its principles was, sooner or later, inevitable. 
 This is not inconsistent with occasional loss of faith, or 
 desire to fly from a fight in which the odds against him were 
 so great. Such temporary reactions befall the upholders 
 of all causes, and to argue from such incidents that Morris 
 was never in full sympathy with Socialism, or that he had 
 made an error which he eventually corrected, is to miss the 
 real lesson of his life. No proper understanding of his 
 many-sided career can be obtained apart from his attitude 
 as a Socialist, for, as Professor Mackail points out, " His 
 innate Socialism if the word may for once be used in its 
 natural sense and not as expressive of any doctrine was, 
 and had been from his earliest beginnings, the quality which, 
 more than any other, penetrated and dominated all he 
 did."* 
 
 * " The Life of William Morris." By J. W. Mackail 
 (1899), vol. i, p. 338, 
 
40 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 It cannot be too often repeated that, for William Morris, 
 politics, no less than art, had no meaning unless they had 
 some direct bearing upon life. His ideas upon politics, 
 just as his ideas upon art, were first given a humanistic turn 
 by Ruskin. " It was through him," he says, " that I 
 learned to give form to my discontent, which I must say 
 was not by any means vague." Apart from the desire 
 to produce beautiful things the controlling passion of his 
 life was a determined hatred of modern civilization. 
 
 In his early manhood he had been a passive holder of the 
 Liberal political faith, or perhaps, to be more exact, a 
 follower of the Radical section of the Liberal party, for with 
 the doctrinaire Liberalism of the laissez-faire school, he 
 ever had the most profound contempt. He voted with his 
 party, when he did vote at all, and even on rare occasions 
 attended public meetings. But his hatred of all that is 
 vague both in politics and art was soon to sever his con- 
 nection with mere party politics. Towards the end of the 
 eighteen-seventies his lectures on art and life expressed his 
 growing discontent with modern social conditions, and in 
 1878, during the opposition to Lord Beaconsfield's Eastern 
 Policy, his loss of political faith is seen in a letter in which he 
 alludes to " the cowardice of the so-called Liberal party." 
 
 His first step in public affairs was taken in 1877, when he 
 founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings ; 
 and at about the same time he aided, with money and 
 work, the Eastern Questions Association, which was formed 
 to fight the Government on the political crisis of the 
 moment. He threw himself heart and soul into the organi- 
 zation, and throughout the Russo-Turkish War was its 
 treasurer. In the May of that year the Association issued 
 an address " To the working men of England," written by 
 Morris, in which his attitude towards the capitalists, who 
 were engaged in one of their numerous attempts to plunge 
 the country into an entirely mercenary war, indicates the 
 ripening of his politics into Socialism. He alluded to the 
 bitterness of and hatred against freedom and progress 
 lying at the hearts of a certain section of the richer classes. 
 He spoke of the way this hatred was veiled in the news- 
 papers, " in a kind of decent language," and with what 
 
SOCIALISM 41 
 
 insolence they spoke of the working man. " These men 
 cannot speak of your order, of its aims, of its leaders," 
 he said, " without a sneer or an insult : these men, if they 
 had the power (may England perish rather !), would thwart 
 your just aspirations, would silence you, would deliver you 
 bound hand and foot for ever to irresponsible capital." 
 
 Here was a definite indication of his later Socialist 
 attitude towards capital and labour ; but as yet, like 
 many men of his day, and like still many in our own day, 
 he had not realized that social salvation could not come 
 from a political organization manned and financed by a 
 section of the capitalist class. So for a little longer he 
 remained a Liberal. The first signs of his break with 
 Liberalism came in the following year, during the con- 
 troversy on this Eastern Question. He wanted to organize 
 a great demonstration against the war-party at Agricultural 
 Hall, and succeeded in getting Gladstone's promise to 
 speak. He booked the hall and got all ready, when " our 
 Parliamentaries began to quake." Even the Eastern Ques- 
 tions Association took fright. The meeting fell through, 
 although, Morris wrote, " Gladstone was quite ready to 
 come up to the scratch, and has behaved well throughout." 
 The Parliamentary trickery of this affair was too much for 
 Morris, so he closed his first short spell of public life and 
 retired to his workshop. 
 
 It was not, however, until two years afterwards that he 
 finally broke with Liberalism. In 1879 he was treasurer 
 of the National Liberal League, an association formed by 
 those working-class representatives who had become 
 politically conscious of their needs during the agitation 
 against the Eastern Policy of the^ Government in 1876. 
 The Liberals came into power at the General Election of 
 1880 on a wave of popular feeling against Lord Beacons- 
 field's policy. Morris's faith, held to his old party now 
 only by the slenderest thread, gave way entirely during the 
 next year. The Irish Coercion Bill of 1881, and the gradual 
 fading away of all promised social reforms in the mists of 
 class privileges and interests and party tactics, turned his 
 attitude Into one of irritation and contempt. The National 
 Liberal League was dissolved, and Morris turned from the 
 
42 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 old political parties for ever. He became an avowed 
 Socialist, and joined the Democratic Federation (afterwards 
 the Social Democratic Federation, and now the Social 
 Democratic Party) on 13 January, 1882. 
 
 Such are broadly the events which marked the final way 
 of William Morris into Socialism. But they must only be 
 taken as the barest outline of what must have finally 
 happened. He was always a Socialist in the broadest 
 sense ; it only required a certain conjunction of circum- 
 stances to make him conscious of it. Among others, those 
 events just narrated were among the more obvious cir- 
 cumstances at about this period of transition, and they 
 no doubt had some considerable influence in deter- 
 mining him in his final step. At the same time he had 
 wrestled somewhat deeply with the intellectual issues of 
 Socialism. His mind had been profoundly moved by the 
 theories of the thinkers of the new social idea. He read 
 Fourier and Robert Owen, and he had furthermore come 
 in contact with many of the Socialist leaders, men like 
 H. M. Hyndman, whom he first met in 1879, Belfort Bax, 
 H. H. Champion, and others. Besides this, it must not be 
 forgotten that there was always something of a Socialist 
 atmosphere, of the kind that might have been derived 
 from the exalted Feudalism of Ruskin, among the crafts- 
 men and art- workers of the time. Many of those who were 
 young artists then afterwards became prominent Socialists. 
 
 Indeed, it was through art really that Morris became a 
 Socialist. When he joined the Democratic Federation 
 he was " blankly ignorant of economics," and had never so 
 much as opened Adam Smith, scarcely heard of Ricardo or 
 Karl Marx. He had, however, read some articles of John 
 Stuart Mill in one of the reviews, in which the economist 
 attacked Fourierist Socialism. " In these papers," says 
 Morris, " he put the arguments, as far as they go, clearly 
 and honestly, and the result, so far as I was concerned, 
 was to convince me that Socialism was a necessary change, 
 and that it was possible to bring it about in our own days." 
 But his own account of his " conversion " through art, 
 and his growing discontent with the civilization that made 
 the production of the things he liked best impossible, may be 
 
SOCIALISM 43 
 
 accepted as very near the truth. Speaking of modern 
 civilization, he says : 
 
 " What shall I say concerning its mastery of, and its 
 waste of mechanical power, its commonwealth so poor, 
 its enemies of the commonwealth so rich, its stupendous 
 organization for the misery of life ? Its contempt of 
 simple pleasures, which every one could enjoy but for its 
 folly ? Its eyeless vulgarity, which has destroyed art, the 
 one certain solace of labour ? All this I felt then as now, 
 but I did not know why it was so. The hope of the past 
 tunes was gone, the struggles of mankind for many ages 
 had produced nothing but this sordid, aimless, ugly con- 
 fusion ; the immediate future seemed to me likely to 
 intensify all the present evils by sweeping away the last 
 of the days before the dull squalor of civilization had 
 settled down on the world. This was a bad look-out 
 indeed, and, if I may mention myself as a personality 
 and not as a mere type, especially so to a man 
 of my disposition, careless of metaphysics and religion, 
 as well as of scientific analysis, but with a deep love of the 
 earth and the life on it, and a passion for the history of the 
 past of mankind. Think of it ! Was it all to end in a 
 counting-house on the top of a cinder heap, with Podsnap's 
 drawing-room in the offing, and a Whig committee dealing 
 out champagne to the rich and margarine to the poor in 
 such convenient proportions as would make all men con- 
 tented together, though the pleasure of the eyes was gone 
 from the world, and the place of Homer was to be taken 
 by Huxley ? Yet, believe me, in my heart, when I really 
 forced myself to look towards the future, that is what I 
 saw in it, and as far as I could tell scarce any one seemed 
 to think it worth while to struggle against such a con- 
 summation of civilization. So there I was in for a fine 
 pessimistic end of life, if it had not somehow dawned on me 
 that amidst all this filth of civilization the seeds of a 
 great change, what we others call Social Revolution, were 
 beginning to germinate. The whole face of things was 
 changed to me by that discovery, and all I had to do then 
 in order to become a Socialist was to hook myself on to the 
 practical movement, which as before said, I have tried_to 
 
44 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 do as well as I could. To sum up, then, the study of 
 history and the love and practice of art forced me into a 
 hatred of the civilization, which if things were to stop as 
 they are would turn history into inconsequent nonsense, 
 and make art a collection of the curiosities of the past 
 which would have no serious relation to the life of the 
 present." * 
 
 The foregoing words, written towards the end of his busy 
 life, broadly represent the attitude Morris always adopted 
 towards Socialism. This is perhaps more obvious to 
 those of the present day, who read the disturbed records 
 of the early years of Socialism in England, than it was to 
 his first Socialist contemporaries. When Morris declared 
 himself a militant Socialist by joining the Democratic 
 Federation, in 1883, the impulsion towards Socialism, 
 which had received its first serious set-back with the failure 
 of the Paris Commune some twelve years earlier, was just 
 beginning to pull itself together again. In England, as 
 on the Continent, its rebirth had come about in an acute 
 burst of political consciousness. The Federation, founded 
 by Henry M. Hyndman in 1881, was its first organized 
 expression in this country. It was the outcome of an 
 attempt, more or less opportunist, to co-ordinate the belated 
 and grey-bearded Chartism of the 'forties and 'fifties 
 with the youthful and sturdy Radical-Socialism then 
 awakening among the working classes. The Radical 
 painter was cut a few years after its formation, when it 
 stood avowedly for direct Socialist action by calling itself 
 the Social Democratic Federation. In principle the 
 Social Democratic Federation was, and is, Marxist ; and 
 its aim, founded on the teachings of Karl Marx, was to 
 urge the dispossessed class, the proletariat, into a warfare 
 with the owning or capitalist class, with the distinct object 
 of capturing the land and capital, and administering these 
 for the benefit of the commonwealth. Its propaganda 
 took the form of education towards political representation 
 on uncompromising Socialist lines. 
 
 * "How I became a Socialist." By William Morris. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. MILITANT SOCIALISM 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS threw himself into the fray with 
 that whole-hearted enthusiasm and superb energy 
 which characterized all his work. He joined the executive of 
 the Federation, lectured at open-air meetings and indoors, 
 both in London and the Provinces, wrote for " Justice," 
 which was established shortly afterwards out of funds 
 provided by Edward Carpenter, and later on kept going 
 with money provided by himself, and did in general any 
 work, no matter how hum-drum, that he found ready to 
 his hand. And this unfailing readiness to serve the cause 
 to the full limit of his genius and purse, always marked his 
 association with Socialism. 
 
 In these early days, the very youth of the Socialist 
 movement, apart from the rawness and inexperience of 
 most of its members, made dissensions inevitable. And 
 Morris had barely been a member of the Social Demo- 
 cratic Federation for two years when a split came, and he 
 and his followers left Hyndman and formed the Socialist 
 League. The actual rupture came about at a conference 
 on 28 December, 1884, and the League was formed in the 
 following January. Tempers ran high and hard words 
 were used on both sides. But some years afterwards 
 Morris owned that he had been in the wrong. " Many 
 years ago," he said, just before his death, at a meeting in 
 support of Hyndman's candidature, at Burnley, "Hynd- 
 man and I had a great quarrel. Now I want you fellows 
 to understand that he was quite right and I was quite 
 wrong." 
 
 Socialist propaganda and action was in its experimental 
 stage, and the various possibilities of the movement were 
 as yet either in the wild state of ".unattached" Socialism, 
 or else creating frictions within the one and only organiza- 
 tion that existed. And the chances of bringing the various 
 
46 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 ideas to some sort of independent expression upon their own 
 lines were considerably impeded by the fact that up to 
 then Socialism and Anarchism in England had not been 
 properly denned. The upholders of each set of ideas 
 were indeed rowing in the same boat, with such confusion 
 as may be imagined. The first body to extricate itself 
 from this tangle was the Fabian Society, formed in 1883 
 to carry on a non-sectarian, educational, and constitutional 
 propaganda, with " permeation " as its watchword. This 
 society captured the least aggressive and most of the abler 
 middle-class Socialists. The Socialist League drew away 
 from the Social Democratic Federation the idealists and 
 the Anarchists, and left the older organization free to carry 
 on its work for independent Socialist action. 
 
 The actual cause of Morris's difference with the Federation 
 was mainly political. His idea then was that the time 
 was not ripe for independent parliamentary action. But 
 this was only the most obvious feature of his discontent. 
 His one distinct aim, apart from the decided political 
 (in the Platonic sense) bent of his craftsmanship, was to 
 make Socialists. His motto was " Education towards 
 Revolution," and he wished to do this on frank Socialist 
 lines, free on the one hand of the necessary intrigue and 
 compromise of parliamentary action, and on the other of 
 the limitations of doctrinaire teachings. The Socialist 
 League was the inevitable outcome of the vitality of the 
 moment. It was the natural abiding - place of those 
 Socialists whtf, like Morris, fell between the two stools 
 of the doctrinaire, " straight-ticket " Socialism of the 
 Social Democratic Federation and the administrative 
 compromise of the Fabians. The League had a short and 
 struggling career and an end that was somewhat tragic. 
 
 Morris became a more ardent propagandist than ever 
 when the Socialist League started. He was its chief initi- 
 ator, guide, and financier. In 1885 he started and ran 
 " The Commonweal," first as a monthly, and then as a 
 weekly, contributing to its pages articles and poems and 
 his two most popular prose romances, " A Dream of 
 John Ball," and " News from Nowhere." But with all 
 his fine enthusiasm and tremendous zeal he could not 
 
MILITANT SOCIALISM 47 
 
 interest the British public In his organization. In the 
 following year, however, what Morris failed to do by good 
 work was done by accident. There had been an attempt 
 on the part of the police to prevent public gatherings at the 
 corner of Dod Street and Burdett Road. The spot had 
 long been recognized as one of London's street forums, 
 and the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist 
 League determined to assert the right of Free Speech by 
 resisting the police. This they did, somewhat mildly, 
 but not so mildly as to have prevented the police arresting 
 eight of the demonstrators. The next day one of them 
 was sentenced to two months hard labour. There was a 
 scene in court and cries of " Shame ! " Morris, who was 
 in court with other Socialists, took part in the expression 
 of feeling, and in the attempt to restore order there was 
 some hustling, when he was arrested for disorderly conduct 
 and striking a policeman. He gave a direct negative to 
 this charge, and was released. The whole affair was slight 
 enough in its way, but it was an attempt to defend the 
 precious right of Free Speech, and the advertisement the 
 League got out of the incident sent it with a bound into 
 something like popularity. 
 
 In the same year there were other similar disturbances, 
 in one of which Morris was arrested for addressing an 
 open-air meeting off the Edgware Road. Two days 
 afterwards he was convicted at Marylebone Police Court 
 for the technical offence of obstruction and fined a shilling 
 and costs. More serious events than these took place 
 during that and the following year. The unemployed 
 meeting in Trafalgar Square on 8 February, 1886, which 
 ended in the mob breaking the windows of West End clubs, 
 stopping carriages and demanding money from the occu- 
 pants, and breaking into and looting several shops, filled 
 the authorities with something like panic. Indeed, 
 many people thought that the events of those winter months 
 were the beginning of a revolutionary movement. The 
 police, at any rate, arguing that prevention was better than 
 cure, determined to suppress as many open-air meetings 
 as possible, and to keep a strict watch upon all street 
 processions. These tactics culminated in the famous 
 
48 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 events in Trafalgar Square on " Bloody Sunday," 13 
 November, 1887. 
 
 A meeting of protest against the Irish policy of the 
 Government had been announced to take place in the 
 Square, and forbidden by the police. So from a mere 
 political gathering the meeting was turned into a monster 
 demonstration in favour of Free Speech, in which all the 
 Socialist, Radical, and advanced societies of London took 
 part. There was an immense crowd and, besides a small 
 army of constables, two squadrons of Life Guards were 
 called out. Besides this the Square was lined with a bat- 
 talion of Foot Guards, with fixed bayonets and twenty 
 rounds of ball cartridge. The Square was cleared, and in 
 the struggle a young man named Alfred Linnell was killed. 
 Morris did not reach there until nearly all was over. He 
 had marched with a Socialist column of six thousand strong 
 from Clerkenwell Green, which had been charged and 
 dispersed by the police in Shaftesbury Avenue. 
 
 All these events contributed to the brief popularity of 
 the League. But Morris was gradually losing confidence 
 in it. In'the first years of his militant Socialism he saw 
 revolt shining on the near horizon, and fully believed 
 that a short and effective struggle would bring Socialism 
 in his own time. His experience of the Socialist Movement 
 of his day convinced him of the error of such a hope. It 
 would take time, both to change the heart and develop 
 the administrative genius of men. But he was under no 
 illusion as to the value of social palliatives, and whilst 
 looking upon the growth of Labourist Socialism with its 
 decided bureaucratic tendencies as inevitable, he knew 
 that, in spite of all the remedial social measures of well- 
 intentioned reformers, without Socialists we could never 
 have Socialism. " Make Socialists," he said, in his final 
 words to the League. " We Socialists can do nothing else 
 that is useful." Right political action would come when a 
 sufficient number had been made. 
 
 He left the Socialist League in 1890, the year following 
 that in which the executive had been captured by the 
 Anarchist Group who had deposed him from the editorship 
 of " The Commonweal." All that was effective in the 
 
MILITANT SOCIALISM 49 
 
 League was now centred in the Hammersmith Branch, 
 which met in an annexe of Kelmscott House, which Morris 
 had turned into a lecture hall. The rest had drifted into 
 the ranks of the Fabian Society and other reform organiza- 
 tions. This branch remained faithful to him, and on his 
 secession from the League it became an independent 
 Socialist society. The League itself went from bad to 
 worse. It became the platform of incapable and ineffective 
 revolutionaries until it expired in 1892, when Nicoll, the 
 editor of " The Commonweal," was sentenced to eighteen 
 months imprisonment for an incendiary article following 
 the conviction of the Walsall Anarchists. With his break 
 with the League, Morris became a more or less passive 
 Socialist, confining his direct propaganda to the Hammer- 
 smith Socialist Society. For the meetings of this society 
 he wrote and delivered several of his finest lectures. 
 
CHAPTER IX. COMMUNISM 
 
 understand the position of William Morris as a 
 J_ Socialist, it is necessary to realize exactly what he 
 meant by a term which even now, after so many years of 
 experience and propaganda, has no very exact meaning 
 for the majority of people. This, no doubt, is to a con- 
 siderable extent inevitable, because Socialism Is an idea, 
 and from its very nature can never be an exact science. 
 But there is no reason why that idea should not be so 
 denned as to be quite clear to the average intelligence. 
 The great difficulty in the way of such a clear definition is 
 the fact that the very essence of Socialism is an extension 
 of individual freedom, spiritual as well as material, beyond 
 any recognized practice in the modern world. Socialism 
 in its broadest sense seeks to make men free by releasing 
 capital, and all that word means, land, labour, machines 
 of production and distribution, from the dominance of 
 private persons, and investing it in the wills of the whole 
 people to be administered for the public good. 
 
 All Socialists will agree so far. But differences arise 
 when, as might be expected, an attempt is made to apply 
 this idea to human conditions. In this process of differ- 
 entiation Morris himself took a conspicuous and determined 
 part. In his day, although so very near to ourj'own, the 
 propaganda of Socialism was complicated by the fact that 
 in the minds of revolutionists even, the divisionalfline 
 between it and that other social idea, Anarchism/had not 
 been clearly recognized. And further, the difficulties were 
 increased by the absence of any fixed ideas upon the place 
 of insurrection and material revolt in the advocacy of the 
 new cause. Nowadays the first of these difficulties has 
 been removed. Anarchism is admitted to be different 
 and even antagonistic to Socialism. Morris saw this, 
 and, as we have seen, it was the capture of tke Socialist 
 
COMMUNISM 51 
 
 League by the Anarchists which finally made him with- 
 draw from militant Socialist propaganda. 
 
 The second difficulty has not yet been fully settled. 
 Although insurrectionism has not been finally " placed," yet, 
 if not absolutely denied by the vast majority of Socialists, 
 it has long since been relegated to that armoury which is 
 locked pending extreme provocation. Socialism in Eng- 
 land has grown out of the passion it drew from its conti- 
 nental teachers, and has become one with the constitu- 
 tional usages of the English people. Morris, with that 
 fine fervour which coloured his whole life, began his 
 Socialist career, as a convinced insurrectionist, and in 
 his early enthusiasm he believed it possible to bring 
 about a complete revolution in a few years. But he 
 reckoned without his material. The workers to whom he 
 turned were unfitted by character and tradition for such 
 a rapid change ; and in the end he became a firm advocate 
 of propaganda by education, although he never overlooked 
 the value of force as a last resource, after the true vision 
 and the proper integrity of purpose had been developed 
 in the majority of the workers. 
 
 But these were not the only obstacles in the way of a 
 clear view of the Socialist idea. The elimination of the 
 illimitable freedoms of the Anarchists and of the possibly 
 premature catastrophies of the insurrectionists, still left 
 many points to be made smoother. These after a while 
 became confined, in a great measure, to questions of 
 propaganda, the main differences in temperament and 
 circumstance being satisfied in one or the other of the 
 three Socialist organizations which were the outcome of 
 the controversies and propaganda of the eighteen-eighties : 
 the Social Democratic Federation, the Fabian Society, and 
 the Independent Labour Party. It was Morris's separa- 
 tion from the first of these and the consequent formation 
 of the now defunct Socialist League, that finally differ- 
 entiated the Anarchist from the Socialist in England. 
 
 But throughout the history of the Socialist movement 
 the process of defining the underlying idea of Socialism 
 itself has never ceased. After the Anarchist question had 
 been settled, all sorts of points as to the limitations of 
 
52 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 personal freedom in reference to property necessarily 
 arose, and out of these that which most affected Morris 
 was the place and quality of production under Socialism. 
 As was natural with one whose Socialism was the outcome 
 of a desire to see the qualities that moved the artist applied 
 to everyday life, he looked upon any tendency towards 
 State Socialism and its inevitable dependence upon the 
 standardization of production, with profound suspicion 
 and distaste. At the same time he was not so indifferent 
 to the difficulties in the way of transferring property from 
 private to collective ownership, as not to recognize that 
 an uncertain period of State Socialism stood between 
 Capitalism and the coming of Socialism proper. 
 
 Such a period was one of the necessary evils of a change 
 for the better. But Morris never tired of endeavouring 
 to make it quite clear, and he went nearer towards accom- 
 plishing this than any other writer on the subject, that 
 State Socialism was a means and not an end. Complete 
 Socialism was Communism, and this could never be brought 
 about by mere legal enactment, superimposed parlia- 
 mentary regulations, or sudden bursts of indifferently 
 informed humanitarian fervour. Socialism could only be 
 realized by something like a revolution in the spirit of the 
 workers which should back up all desire of change with 
 intelligence, courage, and power. " Intelligence enough to 
 conceive, courage enough to will, power enough to compel. 
 If our ideas of a new Society are anything more than a 
 dream, these three qualities must animate the due effec- 
 tive majority of the working people ; and then, I say, the 
 thing will be done." * 
 
 The difference between the Socialism of Morris and that 
 of the more recent type of constitutional and political 
 Socialist, the type of Socialist created by the Fabian 
 Society, will now be more clearly recognized. Morris, 
 like the Fabian, had full faith in education towards Social- 
 ism, but unlike the Fabian he had small faith in Socialism 
 by legal enactment. To him the impetus towards the 
 
 * " Commtmism." By William Morr.'s, (Fabian Tract, 
 No. 113, p. 8.) 
 
COMMUNISM 53 
 
 new society must come from within, and when that is 
 intelligent enough, powerful enough, and courageous 
 enough, it would gain its ends. Parliamentary measures 
 without this, be they never so well-intentioned, would be, 
 at their very best, nothing more than palliatives or experi- 
 ments. And Morris's use of the word " compel " indicates 
 that he had not finally ignored the possible use of some 
 sort of force. But, in the manifesto of the Hammersmith 
 Socialist Society, which he compiled in 1890, whilst depre- 
 cating " spasmodic and desperate acts of violence," on 
 humanitarian and tactical grounds, as tending towards 
 increasing the miseries of the poor and the difficulties of 
 Socialists by alarming the timid, he still sees " that it may 
 be necessary to incur the penalties attaching to passive 
 resistance, which is the true weapon of the weak and the 
 unarmed," and likely to embarrass a tyranny far more 
 than hopeless violence can do. 
 
 In none of his activities was Morris more " out of his 
 due time " than in his Socialism. His whole association 
 with the Socialist movement was something like a tragedy : 
 a tragedy born of the contest between one who was by 
 nature a Socialist, and others who were but the advocates 
 of Socialism. He was so much of a Socialist himself that 
 he could have stepped out of the turmoil of the Capitalist 
 age into Utopia without the slightest inconvenience. 
 Training and transition were not necessary for him, he was 
 born for Communism. He had the gifts of disinterested 
 service and joyful work without which Socialism were 
 impossible. That is why he at first imagined his dream 
 could be realized suddenly. He did not realize his own 
 rarity until his life was nearly over. 
 
 Morris's " due time " was in the thirteenth century, 
 or that coming century in which his own Utopia will be a 
 fact. And although he made a mistake as regards the 
 time in which the great revolution could be accomplished, 
 he never for a moment made any mistake about the 
 kind of Socialism he wanted. 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 
 
54 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 central organization. He demanded complete equality of 
 condition, so that each individual should have sufficient 
 margin to his life for the free play of whatsoever person- 
 ality and idiosyncrasy he had within him, in so far as their 
 expression in nowise endangered a similar freedom in all. 
 This was what he meant by equality. His artistic nature 
 and that prodigal love of colour and design which animated 
 all he ever did, was revolted at the regularity and sameness 
 of such State Socialism as that imagined by Bellamy, and 
 if there had been no alternative to this he would not have 
 remained a Socialist for five minutes. 
 
 But there was an alternative, and this was the Socialism 
 he advocated and, in so far as he was able, lived. " News 
 from Nowhere," with its beautiful vision of a pastoral life 
 of humanized association, was Morris's reply to " Looking 
 Backward," with its vast mechanical organization of town 
 life. Association and decentralization were the passwords 
 of his last phase, and these were to be the means of the 
 fullest expression of that " pleasure in the work itself," 
 which was the underlying principle of his belief in politics, 
 economics, and art. He was firmly convinced that the 
 problem of the'organization of life could not be dealt with by 
 a huge national centralization, " 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 communal- 
 ization of social feeling, the awakening of social conscious- 
 ness in such a way as to abolish any sense of the state as a 
 thing apart from the individual. 
 
 Communism would realize itself in the family idea as dis- 
 tinct from the army idea of Collectivism. Instead of the 
 organized regularity of battalions expressed in uniformity, 
 we should have the equality of free groups with a margin 
 for variation. No family would be richer than its neigh- 
 bour 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 
 
COMMUNISM 55 
 
 be confined 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 production and 
 distribution of the communal property. Variety of life 
 Morris considered as much a part of Communism as 
 equality of condition, and this could only be fully at- 
 tained through labour which had become art. 
 
 This idea of local administration, based upon the freedom 
 of individuals from economic need and the tyranny of 
 masters, would spread from the individual to the group or 
 guild, and from thence to the wider field of the whole 
 community, until it finally embraced the civilized world. 
 
 " Men will at last come to see," he says, " that the only 
 way to avoid the tyranny and waste of bureaucracy is by 
 the Federation of Independent Communities : their 
 federation being for definite purposes ; for fostering the 
 organization of labour, by ascertaining the real demand 
 for commodities, and so avoiding waste ; for organizing 
 the distribution of goods, the migration of persons in 
 short, the friendly inter- communication of people whose 
 interests are common, although the circumstances of their 
 natural surroundings made necessary differences of life 
 and manners between them." * The state would be a 
 federation of individuals, just as the world would be a 
 federation of communities, and exchange would be friendly 
 instead of commercial. Rivalry for profit would be sub- 
 stituted by the rivalry of excellence ; production would 
 be thus increased in quality, and the freeing of men from 
 fashionable or enforced idleness would increase its quantity 
 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 intel- 
 lectual and imaginative treasures of life. 
 
 * "Signs of Change" (1888), />. 200. 
 
CHAPTER X. THE FELLOWSHIP OF MAN 
 
 THROUGHOUT the work of William Morris there is a 
 robust note of good fellowship not confined merely to 
 man, a " feeling kindly unto all the earth," which is con- 
 stantly rinding expression in his joy in the beauty of the 
 world and in devising means to make that beauty tri- 
 umphant. This feeling is not a mild sentiment, it Is a 
 religious conviction, a part of the inner life of Morris, 
 and, like all genuine religious emotion, it has a fighting 
 element, a bugle call, in its composition. This was seen 
 in his militant attitude towards the degradation of human 
 life by capitalism. But it did not end there, he was not only 
 prepared to fight against that ; he would have been equally 
 ready to defend his Utopia when it had been realized. 
 Even in his own day, when he forgot the poverty of the 
 peasants, he saw in the beautiful downs of southern England 
 " a country-side worth fighting for," and the White Horse 
 carved on the hill-side by the valorous men of the past, 
 was a sign for him of the valour and courage which might 
 come again. His heroes were dauntless warriors, vikings, 
 and the strong kindly men of his imaginative tales, and his 
 innate democratic sense was not outraged at the idea of 
 service under some intrepid large-hearted hero. " The 
 only decent official that England ever had," he said, " was 
 Alfred the Great." 
 
 His consciousness was Utopian. He lived a double life, 
 one amidst the turmoil and chaos of a society which 
 antagonized him at every point, and the other, his real 
 life, in a wondrous realm of happy fellowship and bright 
 colour, a peaceful sanctuary full of the activities of useful 
 work joyfully performed and steeped in a large and re- 
 flective leisure. As an artist his contributions to life were 
 contributions to such a life as this : materializations of his 
 dream. His gorgeous tapestries and chintzes; his richly 
 painted manuscripts and noble books with their pages 
 
THE FELLOWSHIP OF MAN 57 
 
 bursting into wondrous device of flower and leaf ; his 
 stained glass, his embroideries, his carpets with their 
 beautiful intricate designs and rich colourings ; his 
 dreamful tapestried romances with their long melodious 
 names " The Roots of the Mountains," " The Story of the 
 Glittering Plain," " The Waters of the Wondrous Isles," 
 "The Sundering Flood," and "The Wood Beyond the 
 World," and " The Well at the World's End," were not the 
 products of our age. They were born out of their due time 
 if ever works of man were. They are alone amidst the 
 modern sea of vulgar luxuriousness and poor shoddy. 
 William Morris was a magician with the power of making 
 the stuff of dreams realities. 
 
 His imagination was a panorama of a beautiful world 
 unborn. Every detail of his vision was exact and vivid ; he 
 actually saw with his mind's eye the Utopia he wanted. 
 He would have compromised for some move hi its direction, 
 to be sure, but he never wavered from his own faith, his 
 dream was inviolable, and he saw at the end of all the chaos 
 and the reforms, his own bright commune " in England's 
 green and sunny land." Towards the end of his life he 
 gave the world, in " News from Nowhere," a peep into this 
 realm, and through his magic casement amazed eyes 
 look out upon an England grown young again ; a happy 
 land of pleasant toil and careless ease. There were no 
 monstrous cities with sky-scraping buildings any more than 
 there were towering personalities or organizations. The 
 familiar backwash of humanity, as we know it in the ugliness 
 of poverty, was as absent as the pestiferous scrap-heaps of 
 our big cities. All was clean and dignified. Men and 
 women went about their work with a deeper joy than we go 
 about our feverish spells of play ; and the happiness of their 
 days was expressed in the sincere beauty of their bright and 
 clean little towns. The puckered brow and anxious eyes 
 of the commercial age were replaced by a joyful serenity 
 of expression born of that freedom from care which began 
 when work for profit was replaced by work for use. " The 
 reward of labour is life," they said, and were content, and 
 the one little rift in their happy lute was the fear that work 
 would become extinct. 
 
58 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 But the communistic gospel of William Morris does not 
 end in a sweet vision of a pastoral Utopia ; that is Nowhere. 
 And here in this grim and laborious Somewhere is work to 
 be done. In the vision of this work his gospel grows 
 prophetic, and out of the deeps of his love of men he raises 
 aloft his voice in the cause of fellowship. The religion of 
 Morris is contained in that word. " Fellowship is life, 
 lack of fellowship is death," says the Seer of Kent in 
 " A Dream of John Ball," the book into which Morris 
 put his fullest utterances upon human life. And, as if 
 moved by the depth and earnestness of his theme, this work, 
 this simple story of the peasant rising in medieval England, 
 represents the highest point he ever reached as a writer of 
 prose, and perhaps the highest point of all his work as a 
 writer. For never before did his pen weave such beauti- 
 fully worded and balanced sentences out of his teeming 
 brain. He became a prophet in the tale of a prophet, 
 inspired by the fervour of John Ball, which corresponded 
 so much with the passion of his own life. This small book 
 is the great parable of English Socialism, and it is the 
 religion behind the richly coloured dream of William 
 Morris. 
 
 " Yea, forsooth, once again I saw as of old," says John 
 Ball to the men of Kent, " the great treading down the 
 little, and the strong beating down the weak, and cruel men 
 fearing not, and kind men daring not, and wise men caring 
 not ; and the saints in heaven forbearing and yet bidding 
 me not to forbear ; forsooth, I knew once more that he 
 who dwelleth well in fellowship, and because of fellowship, 
 shall not fail though he seem to fail to-day, but in days 
 hereafter shall he and his work yet be alive, and men be 
 holpen by them to strive again and yet again ; and yet 
 indeed that was little, since, forsooth, to strive was my 
 pleasure and my life."* 
 
 Thus strove and taught Morris ; he wore the mantle 
 of John Ball, and saw with a full certainty that in fellow- 
 ship and in happy strife alone can life be properly used. He 
 knew for certain that it was not only in the cold " better- 
 
 * "A Dream of John Ball" (1888), p. 33. 
 
THE FELLOWSHIP OF MAN 59 
 
 ment " of human conditions that the new life would come 
 about, but that in addition to this men would have to 
 realize the essential fellowship of their lives and come to 
 live together as comrades free of slaves and of masters. 
 
 " And how shall it be when these are gone ? What else 
 shall ye lack when ye lack masters ? Ye shall not lack 
 for the fields ye have tilled, nor the houses ye have built, 
 nor the cloth ye have woven ; all these shall be yours, 
 and whatso ye will of what 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 buildeth a house shall dwell 
 in it with those that he biddeth 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 of August ; and all shall be without money and 
 without price. Faithfully and merrily then shall men keep 
 the holy days of the Church in peace of body and joy of 
 heart. 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."* 
 
 * "A Dream of John Ball" (1888), p. 40. 
 
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