MIA > Archive > Lunacharsky
Published in: Nov’, issue 102, 7 May 1914. Reprinted in Collected Works (Sobranie sochinenii) vol. 5, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1965
Translation and notes by: Edmund Griffiths (2006).
Markup by: Graham Seaman for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Licence: Creative Commons CC-BY. To satisfy this license you need only acknowledge MIA as the source of the material and Edmund Griffiths as the translator, and provide a link to this page.
File uploaded: August 2026.
Since the triumph of capitalism in England, art there has been shoved into the background. The unfortunate Oscar Wilde’s ultra-aestheticism emerged, in part, as a despairing protest against the new order.
Today, when the English have taken it into their heads to dazzle Paris with the successes of their decorative art,[1] the objects they have brought over were made by the skilled and reverential hands of the artists grouped around Ruskin and Morris—artists who, even if they enjoyed a long, long life, have by now closed their eyes.
I do not know whether English art has a single major victory to inscribe in its annals since the sixties of the last century.
But the Pre-Raphaelite episode—exciting, beautiful, and unexpected—still stands out against the soot-besmirched backdrop of the businessmen’s coal and iron England.
Morris, together with his closest associate, the great symbolist painter Burne-Jones, studied at Oxford University. In England, which preserves decorative relics of antiquity so strangely alongside the acutest manifestation of capitalism, this aristocratic institution of learning represents one of the most typical islands of an era long past.
It was here, in dim Gothic halls, among buildings reflecting a strange spirit of undisturbed mediaevalism, in an environment full of settled taste, surrounded by objects bearing the stamp of a strict unity of style, that these young students grew to maturity.
They were sensitive people, receptive to beauty, easily attuned to that solemn harmony; and the din and bustle of the barbarous modern street shocked them. They saw a mournful gulf between the old, beautiful England and the new, where factory chimneys rise higher than the steeples of the old abbeys.
The two friends’ ears were already primed for the preaching of Ruskin, who with brilliant polemical madness attacked an age that sought to degrade and destroy labour itself, not only demeaning the worker in the means of subsistence but laying a curse on the objects that the worker made—objects empty of any creativity or human value, calculated only to be sold to an ever more faceless mass.
A restoration of style, a return to the precepts of artistic life—profound and wise in its awareness of the human duty to create beautiful things in a beautiful universe—merged in William Morris’s thinking with the task of saving labour from prostitution by capitalist exploitation and soulless castration by the market.
Of course, the socialism that thus arose in Morris was not free of a reactionary colouration. In the same way, Sismondi in France, Tolstoy with us, Carlyle in England itself, all suffering cruelly from the chaos of the present day, looked back with longing, idealizing a dark and servile era, which, while in certain respects it surpasses the modern period, in others arouses our horror. Indignant at the feebleness of capitalist culture, its brutality and automatism, these people were prepared to overlook the colossal elemental forces that it has subjugated, enslaving them forever to the human spirit.
But if the socialism of Morris, who spoke out firmly in defence of labour as the sole bearer and creator of genuine beauty, who proclaimed the intimate fusion of craft and art not just in theory but in practice, if his socialism did include some traits of Utopian reaction—for it seemed to Morris that the rebirth of craft was only thinkable by way of rejecting the machine—then politically Morris was never a reactionary.
This man, who spent his whole life studying one craft after another, who put an enormous beauty into his glassware, his ceramics, his book bindings and printed books, his wallpapers, fabrics, furniture, tapestries, tiles, etc., etc., truly felt himself to be a worker. For Morris, to be a really decent worker, a maker of humanized objects, a conscientious maker of them and therefore an artist and a parent of beauty, was a much loftier title than that of a ‘pure’ artist, apt in the caprice of genius to forget about art’s laborious, productive essence.
This is why Morris so often found himself alongside the workers during their protests and demonstrations. From the aristocratic idea of style in life it took only a step to cross the barricade and accept the socialist idea.
The celebrated American writer Upton Sinclair and his wife have lately been arrested in a crowd in New York, where they were trying to break the windows of the billionaire Rockefeller, in whose name workers were being murdered in Colorado.[2]
Morris was in situations like that more than once.
His cooperative enterprises do bear the mark of a certain Utopianism. Elegant handmade objects cannot be available to all; the products of Morris’s democratic art went to adorn the dwellings of the rich and the rich alone. But this was not the problem. Morris’s precepts on matters of principle could, in fact, have been combined with the latest achievements of technology. The problem is that the brilliant pléiade of Ruskin and Rossetti, Morris and Burne-Jones, Madox Brown and Millais, have died out—and what is left? Nothing at all! One more memory has been added to England’s traditions; but in England’s present reality hardly anything of it remains alive. No, as long as capital dominates, the attempt to create an art for all—an art whose quiet charm will light up the darkest corners of daily life—must remain a dream, or be transformed as soon as it becomes reality into a luxury that only snobs can afford. And yet the time that Morris dreamt of will come, the time he wrote about—being a major poet, on top of all his other art—in his book News from Nowhere, when people will create not to sell but for the joy of creating. But it will not come tomorrow; and more than a little work will need to be done to hasten its coming.
Today, however, it is not without reverence that one walks through the halls of the Pavillon de Marsan, sensing redolences of the great soul of William Morris at every turn. His influence on all his brilliant friends was profound. These solemn, simple, architecturally serious ensembles, these calm murals, these vases and goblets, exquisite in line and worked with love, these hundreds of pieces that all seem to have been made with a prayer to the life and genius of humankind—they are attractive and they are moving. But dominating above them all are William Morris’s stupendous, incomparable tapestries, made by himself, his wife, and his friends to designs by Burne-Jones.[3] They depict a cycle of the legends of the Round Table, legends that have grown from their fathomlessly ancient roots in Breton saga and, passing through the souls of subsequent poets up to Tennyson inclusive, have repeatedly taken on new colourings and been subjected to new alterations.
They are perhaps nowhere so beautiful as they are in the hands of Burne-Jones. All the characters are beautiful, with a restrained, solemn beauty, as though the fathomlessness of space and the mysteries of life slightly scared them. These noble ladies, with the folds of their dresses falling and flowing so rhythmically, with their hair like wreaths of gold, with their keenly questioning eyes and their enigmatically silent lips; these knights, devoted, ecstatic, full of bravery and love; the dense shadow of this enchanted woodland; these flowers and herbs, full of a meek wisdom; these animals, our sisters and brothers; the whole world, magical, dark, but with some glad promise in the depths of it—how delightful it all is! To possess a tapestry like these, woven by the skilful hands of an inspired artist, reproducing the design in all the velvety shades of the rich fabric, to have it before you always: would that not be to light up your room with an image that blazed out faith in life and its purpose?
Yes, the art of William Morris and his friends was great. And their dream of shedding rays of it into the homes of the poor and the toilers was magnificent. The dream failed. They sleep in their graves. Few have come forward to replace them. But theirs was not the kind of hope that dies. The great strength of the poor, toiling people themselves will one day make a reality of the visions that moved these artists in their rebellion against capital. Until then, official England is inclined to take pride in them; and King George came to Paris to solemnly open the exhibition of the works of the revolutionary socialist William Morris.
1. Refers to an exhibition organized by the British government at the Pavillon de Marsan in Paris, under the title ‘Decorative Arts of Great Britain and Ireland’. The article first appeared in the Moscow newspaper Nov’, of which Lunacharsky was the Paris correspondent. — Translator’s note.
2. Refers to the Colorado Coalfield War of 1913–14. — Translator’s note.
3. The Holy Grail tapestries. — Translator’s note.
Last updated on 26 August 2026