Looking Backward ("Het Jaar 2000") had converted me into a quasi-understanding sentimental socialist. Bellamy's prosaic Utopia had opened my eyes to the wrongs, injustices, and follies of present day society, and set before those eyes a vision of what seemed to me then an ideal community of brothers and sisters whose relations of production and distribution seemed, moreover, scientifically correct and practicable.
That book not only had to become a bestseller because of the novelty of the concept (I was not yet familiar with the Utopias of Plato, More, Cabet, etc.), but it would set the masses in motion, electrify them. People were bound to feel the rightness, the logic, the irrefutability of the book, and would surely set to work tomorrow to realize the idea embodied in that book. Bellamy the architect had drawn the plan today, completed the design — tomorrow "the people" would put their hands to constructing the design, and the day after tomorrow "the people," the very same ones, would move into the building.
Disillusion was not long in coming, nor was its consequence: the evident need for a serious, thorough study of the social question and all that pertains to it.
First economics. I struggled through De Bruin Kops, read Vissering with some pleasure and found the study of Pierson's book not without importance, also from a purely literary point of view. I picked about in Stuart Mill and then Marx came along. Later followed some more from Engels and others, a dash of de Lavelye, a little Jevons, etc.[1]
But long before all that erudition had been digested, I had come to see that a great deal was lacking in the scientific accuracy of Bellamy's system of production and distribution, I had come to understand that the literary value of Bellamy's book was not very great, and I had developed an instinctive aversion to Looking Backward's "mass-regulated" future society.
It looked as if I would have to continue living and working without a clearly defined future society, would have to keep propagandizing without any idea of the community that was to come — which idea later turned out to be rather superfluous.
Chance favoured me, however, and handed me a book entitled News from Nowhere by William Morris.
William Morris?
Who in the Netherlands had ever heard of William Morris? None of my acquaintances had ever heard the name mentioned. Yet this William Morris must be a socialist, given the content of his book, and a literary artist of the very first rank, given the form in which that socialist content was cast. And in neither capacity was he known here in this country to those who needed to know the name.
This was the result of the facts that the English socialist movement was young and of very little significance, so that its leading men, with the exception of Hyndman, were virtually unknown outside England, and that Morris was not one of the fashioniable poets who people "gushed over", and was therefore not known by the slavish imitators and copycats in this country. It is, however, most remarkable that even someone like Van Deyssel did not seem to know Morris, perhaps does not know him even now, according to his statement recently made in De Kroniek, on the occasion of the interesting polemic between Diepenbrock and Tak and others, in which he (Van Deyssel) flatly maintained, that there are absolutely no literary artists who are also committed to socialism.[2]
William Morris, born in 1834, was the son of very wealthy parents. His education was that of all rich men's sons in England: first public school and then the classical training of the university, in this case Oxford.
He devoted himself to painting and soon became acquainted with Rossetti and Burne-Jones, the two great Pre-Raphaelites. He did not rise to great heights in painting, but his mastery as a poet was already evident in his first work The Defense of Guenevere, published in 1858. Next appeared The Life and Death of Jason; his masterpiece The Earthly Paradise; Love is enough, translations of the Aeneid and the Odyssey, and The Roots of the Mountains.[3]
Morris was particularly drawn to the Norse and Icelandic sagas. The Vikings, the heroic figures of the Norse chronicles, the intrepid warriors and navigators, were his spiritual darlings; he may have had Viking blood in his veins himself. He looked, with his stout build, ruddy complexion, full beard, and loose-flowing hair, just like a sailor, looking anything but a conventional poet, and having none of the refined appearance of Tennyson or the effeminacy of Swinburne. Norse and Icelandic folklore was his preferred leisure study. With the Icelander Erik Magnussen he edited and translated a large number of sagas and legends. In connection with his Norse studies he also wrote the great and imposing poem The story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fa11 of the Nibelungs.
Morris had always been an unconscious socialist. His Earthly Paradise and his Roots of the Mountains attest to it in many places. But even more than those few passages, this is evidenced by his aversion to the vulgar, the common, the bourgeois-ordinary, the conformism, the zombieism, which characterize all the products of the modern, capitalist, commercial mode of production.
So, with some like-minded friends, following the death of his father, he set up a manufactory for articles for household use, of wallpaper, silk fabrics, embroideries, and other decorative art products, as well as a printshop. The printshop house was located in his home, Kelmscott House, on The Mall: the Thames embankment of London's Hammersmith district. Until his death, Morris, assisted by Walter Crane and others, remained the lynchpin of these workshops, whose products have had, and still have, a huge influence on the refinement of the decorative arts.
For Morris was above all a craftsman, as he liked to call himself. He did not know and did not want to know what is called the "crafts industry".[4] Art and the crafts were inseparable to him. Arts and crafts were not separate things to him; his art was craft, and his craft was art.
He himself drew the patterns for his wallpaper, cut them himself in wood and printed them with hand presses in his own printshop.
He himself cut the fonts for his typefaces, he himself drew and cut the decorations of his initials, the borders and other decorative illuminations for each book separately, and printed them, like Caxton and Plantijn, page by page, on hand presses, with the greatest possible care and dedication. Needless to say, all the modern "beautiful" printing, with its meaningless, crazy lines and curlicues and slashes and asterisks and little half-circles and decorated letters and silly color combinations, was an abomination to him.
How he admired the buildings, the printing, the ornaments, the seemingly rough, sturdy industrial products of the Middle Ages—how he hated and abhorred the smooth, the slick, the stereotyped of the present day. Just read this excerpt from News from Nowhere (the man from the nineteenth century, transported to the society of the future, is having dinner with some of his new friends):
"I was going to speak to her on the subject, when the pretty waitresses came to us smiling, and chattering sweetly like reed warblers by the river-side, and fell to giving us our dinner. As to this, as at our breakfast, everything was cooked and served with a a daintiness which showed that those who had prepared it were interested in it; but there was no excess either of quantity or of gourmandise; everything was simple, though so excellent of its kind; and it was made clear to us that this was no feast, only an ordinary meal. The glass, crockery, and plate were very beautiful to my eyes, used to the study of mediaeval art; but a nineteenth century club-haunter would, I daresay, have found them rough and lacking in finish; the crockery being lead-glazed pot-ware. though beautifully ornamented; the only porcelain being here and there a piece of old oriental ware. The glass, again, though elegant and quaint, and very varied in form, was somewhat bubbled and hornier in texture than the commercial articles of the nineteenth century. The furniture and general fittings of the hall were much of a piece with the table-gear, beautiful in form and highly ornamental, but without the commercial `finish' of the joiners and cabinet-makers of our time. Withal, there was a total absence of what the nineteenth century calls `comfort' - that is, stuffy inconvenience; so that, even apart from the delightful excitement of the day I had never eaten my dinner so pleasantly before."
His study and application of the decorative arts soon taught him about the origins of the vulgar ugliness of our capitalist products, made him fear that in capitalist society things would always remain ugly, that everything would always become uglier and that the general development of artistic taste and the general unification of art and craft were only possible in a society that did not rest on a capitalist commercial foundation. He expressed these ideas in his work The Decorative Arts — their Relation to modern Life, which appeared in 1878, and was therefore conceived and written before he had actually become a socialist. In 1882, however, after he had gone over to socialism, his Hopes and Fears for Art appeared, in which it is plainly stated and shown that only through and with socialism can that ideal be achieved. These things were explained even more clearly in his Signs of Change, which dates from 1890 and in which the same ideas are developed as in Walter Crane's Claims of Decorative Art, translated into our language by Mr.Jan Veth, under the title Kunst en Samenleving.[5]
It is the most natural thing in the world that someone who thought like this about the results of the capitalist-commercial system, who had such a profound abhorrence for the manfold ugliness of our society as Morris, should eventually become a socialist.
He did, therefore, and after a thorough study of socialism (he was especially interested in the historical part of Marx's Kapital), he became one of the founders of the Social Democratic Federation, lending lustre and prestige to the new party by his name. With Hyndman he wrote the famous pamphlet A Summary of the Principles of Socialism, which was in fact the founding manifesto of the aforementioned SDF, and in which the parts written by Morris are immediately recognisable. Hyndman wrote the economic section, Morris the historical and the ethical.
From that time on he was one of the most diligent propagandists of socialism in England, first in the context of the SDF and later, after he, together with Dr. and Mrs. Aveling, had separated from that body in 1884 and founded the Socialist League, in this new organization, whose organ, Commonweal, was long edited by Morris.
Morris was an inspiring speaker; those who had once heard him never forgot the impression. Conviction, enthusiasm, encouragement, exhortation, and knowledge emanated from his speeches, the form of which, it need hardly be said of a man like Morris, was most beautiful.
Yet he was not stingy with his gift of speaking. He spoke at large meetings as well as at neighbourhood gatherings in small halls, in public parks, as well as on street corners. He spoke with as much fervour and devotion to ten as to ten thousand. More than that. He bore the conviction that every socialist had to give everything for the cause that he could give. Therefore, Morris not only wrote newspapers and pamphlets, but also distributed them in the streets and at meetings as needed. And when manifestos or handbills had to be handed out, Morris was there and did what the most ignorant, least notable of his party members did—he, the genius poet and writer, the great art reformer and artist.
Naturally he also devoted his great poetic gifts to the cause he loved and advocated.
England has a number of revolutionary poets of the highest and first rank to exhibit that no other country can match. Shelley, Francis Adams, Ernest Jones, Edward Carpenter and many others have provided England with an inexhaustible wealth of glorious war chants. But Morris is above them all. Oh, how I wish I had a spark of Morris's god-given gift to translate into Dutch his socialist verses—his rhythmic Socialist Marching Song, from which the heavy thumping footsteps of the advancing proletariat beat in our ears:
"Hark! the rolling of the thunder!
Lo! the Sun, and lo! thereunder
Riseth wrath and hope and wonder,
And the host comes marching on."
or his beautiful, prophetic The Day is coming:
"Come hither lads, and hearken, for a tale there is to tell,
Of the wonderful days a-coming, when all shall be better then well."
or his heartening and uplifting All for the Cause:
"Hear a word, a word in season, for the day is drawing nigh,
When the Cause shall call upon us, some to live and some to die".
or his cheerful, restful Socialist Drinking Song!
Morris has written a great deal in the service of socialism, in addition to the numerous pamphlets and newspaper articles. In first place is News from Nowhere, which in conception and certainly in form is infinitely higher than Looking Backward. Anyone who has read News from Nowhere and the description of the future society contained therein, contracts an irresistible homesickness, a burning longing for that future, and must fight for that future.
Then we have his Dream of John Ball, a day with John Ball, with Wat Tyler the head of the peasant rebellion in England. This work is moreover a masterpiece of mediaeval English, and our orators who know English would do well to take note of the speech which John Ball gives to the farmers of Kent before the battle. The splendid satire A King's Lesson is appended to John Ball.
With Ernest Belfort Bax, Morris also wrote the historical-scientific work Socialism: its Growth and Outcome, published in 1893, while at the time of his death preparations were being made for the publication of a new utopian work by the Kelmscott Press, Morris' printworks.
Morris was an anarchist for a time and with him the Socialist League became anarchist. The anarchist element killed that organization, as it kills any organization, and nothing remained of it but the small, non-anarchist Hammersmith Socialist Society, which held its meetings in Morris's house. Morris soon turned away from anarchism, however, and became and remained a firm supporter of social democracy and its tactics. In an interview with him in 1894 by one of the staff of the English party paper Justice, Morris, when asked, "You think that political means are the only ones available?" replied as follows:
"At the present moment, yes. I think we have to create a party. A party with delegates in the House of Commons which would have complete control over those delegates, and would rapidly grow. The party of reaction would make concession after concession until it was forced over the edge, and then they would probably surrender at discretion. That has been the history of most popular movements in this country. You cannot start with revolt — you must lead up to it. and exhaust other means first. I do not argue that you should abstain from any act merely on the ground that it would precipitate civil war, even though the result of the civil war were problematical, so long as the initial act was justifiable. But with the tremendous power of modern armies it is essential that everything should be to legalise revolt. As we have seen, the soldiers will fire upon the people without hesitation so long as there is no doubt as to the legality of doing so. Men do not fight well with halters round their necks, and that is what a revolt now would mean. We must try and gain a position to legalise revolt — to, as you have put it, get at the butt end of the machine gun and the rifle, and then force is much less likely to be necessary and much more sure to be successful."
Morris was equally revered and worshipped by all socialist parties, associations and groups in England. He was the Bayard,[6] the fearless knight of Socialism. Not a single blemish stained the Chieftain, as the English comrades so fondly called him. His position in the movement was unique. He alone was the man who could have united the divided socialist groups in England into one mighty party—and he certainly would have done it, had not death put an end to his well-lived, honourable life. The death of Morris has delayed the ideal of a United Socialist Party in England for a very long, even indefinite, time. Morris' death has left a void that can never be filled. A figure like Morris is only born once every thousand years. And the anguish felt by the English comrades at Morris' passing was most profoundly and simply expressed by Robert Blatchford, when he wrote in his newspaper: "It seems to me as if it matters not what is in the Clarion this week — because William Morris is dead."
1. Jacob Leonard de Bruyn Kops, Simon Vissering, Nicolaas Gerard Pierson were all Dutch Liberal statesmen and political economists. Émile Louis Victor de Laveleye was a Belgian Liberal economist, while Jevons was an English founding figure of marginalist economics. Not what might be expected for a socialist economic education: a series of liberal economists, interrupted by Marx and Engels.
2. P.L. Tak, not then a member of a Socialist party, had written an article in his journal De Kroniek praising socialism in general and Bebel in particular. Diepenbrock replied as a monarchist, sparking a debate between various figures on the Dutch art scene on the merits of Socialism. Lodewijk van Deyssel was a noted art critic who took part in this debate. (Original debate in Herdrukken uit De Kroniek, Pieter Lodewijk Tak, available on archive.org)
3. Polak repeatedly implies that Roots of the Mountain was one of Morris's early works, when in fact it was published in 1889
4. The Dutch word used is "kunstnijverheid".
5. "... a certain dichotomy exists between his [Veth's] ideal of criticism as art and the analysis of art in the public service, which he praised in the work of his fellow critics. This conflict within the art criticism of Veth shows a remarkable parallel to that in the literary and political articles that appeared in De Nieuwe Gids, the clearest manifestation of which is to be found in the polemic between Frank van der Goes and Lodewijk van Deyssel concerning Art and Socialism. The other editors took sides and before too long the very existence of the magazine was threatened. Veth did not participate but he was to define his standpoint publicly in the struggle, in the issue later, when in 1894 he translated Walter Crane's book The Claims of Decorative Art into Dutch, under the suggestive title Kunst en Samenleving (Art and Society)."
[Art Criticism in De Nieuwe Gids, Carel Blotkamp: Simiolus, Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol. 5, No. 1/2 (1971), pp. 116-136 (available on jstor.org]
6. 'Bayard' was Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard (c. 1476 – 30 April 1524): 'le chevalier san peur et sans reproche', symbol of chivalry.
William Morris
Henri Polak
De Nieuwe Tijd (Social democratic monthly magazine) volume 1, 1896 pp. 287 - 293 (original on delpher.nl)
Henri Polak (1868-1943) was a leading figure on the Dutch industrial and political left: founder of the Diamond Workers Union (ANDB), and one of the founders of the Dutch Socialist Workers' Party. He was also deeply involved in debates on art and socialism, being an editor of the journal De Nieuwe Tijd. His interest included architecture: he arranged for the headquarters of the Diamond Workers' Union to be designed by the architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage. Polak lived in London from 1886-1890, but does not appear to have known Morris personally.
Graham Seaman and Wanne Mendonck, February 2023
Graham Seaman, February 2023