The Gothic Socialist

WILLIAM MORRIS, HIS LIFE, WORK AND FRIENDS by Philip Henderson. 388 pages. McGraw-Hill. $9.95.

Karl Marx was very rude about people like William Morris, the poet, artist-craftsman and social revolutionary. "Christian Socialism," he wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat."

It was an unfair, but not altogether untrue summary of Morris' lifelong attempt to replant some of the virtues of medieval Christendom into the sooty soil of 19th century England.

Morris' new biography, written with sympathetic irony, draws on J. W. Mackail's exhaustive work of 1899 and adds psychological material once thought improper. Morris shines through the pages as a prodigious Victorian, one of a long line of self-confident zealots whose faith and energies gave them a stature that the modern mini-man can only wonder at. A dozen specialist scholars --in politics, poetry, architecture, painting, interior design, cabinetry, fabrics--would be needed to catalogue his achievements. The aim of his life was to restore craftsmanship and beauty to a deprived industrial working class. He was concerned with the deep discrepancy between the dark satanic mills of industrial England and the idyl (real or imagined) of rural life hedged in tradition. It is a discrepancy still known in 20th century America, and it makes Morris' life relevant reading today.

Dancing on the Greensward. When Morris died in 1896 at 62, almost his last words were: "I want to get mum-bo-jumbo out of the world." He had put a good deal into it. His vision of a materialist Utopia with an art-craft peasantry, and Morris himself dancing on the greensward, bordered on the ridiculous. The masterpiece printed by his Kelmscott Press was a massive edition of Chaucer, illustrated by himself and the painter Burne-Jones. It cost -L- 20-- probably the equivalent of a half-year's wages of one of the men who toiled in the Devonshire copper mine from which Morris derived his fortune.

Morris was only partly conscious of the absurdity of his position, but it may have unconsciously disturbed him. He was naturally a playful, jovial fellow, yet the end of his life was cursed by explosive rages, which may have betrayed his awareness that the world was not following the course he had set for it. He believed that industrial division of labor, which Marx saw as a tool of the socialist apocalypse, was simply the proliferation of stultifying jobs. Yet the descendants of Morris' socialist working men have now settled for the machine-made blessings of the welfare state, stultifying or not. They would sooner be caught in drag than dancing on the greensward in homespun or chipping gargoyles on a cathedral.

Moldy Stones. The obvious retort to Morris' life and vision is to say "Go found a monastery." This, in fact, is just what Morris first tried to do. He was just 21, an Oxford undergraduate who had inherited the then fat income of -L-900 a year from his speculator father, and had acquired an enthusiasm for medieval art. In college, he became friends with "Ned" Burne-Jones; together they doted on every moldy pre-Renaissance stone in the place and, for a while, considered following the celebrated Catholic convert John Henry Newman. They and their friends called themselves a "brotherhood," forerunner of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters.

They read ecclesiastic history, pored over medieval manuscripts, and for relaxation visited cathedrals or read their contemporaries: Tennyson, who was writing about the knights of the Round Table, and Ruskin, who was writing about the ancient splendor and modern squalor in architecture. Morris got himself into an echoing rage when a suit of armor he had commissioned from the Oxford blacksmith (the better to pose for a picture) jammed its visor and locked the prophet within.

Though it may have been absurd, there was nothing contemptible about the antiquarian passion that swept a good part of the British upper classes at the time, when architects like Sir George Gilbert Scott and A.W.N. Pugin were creating hundreds of Neo-Gothic churches and restorations throughout England, and Sir Charles Barry was faking the medieval Houses of Parliament. For a generous spirit like Morris, it was an easy step from saying that life once was beautiful to believing that it could and should be beautiful again.

Verses & Wine. This feeling made a Utopian socialist of him. He influenced generations of obscure idealists throughout the world who read his News from Nowhere, a palimpsest of nonexistent felicities, as if it were a blueprint for the future. The illogic inherent in the notion that an infatuation with wimples, rood screens and the music of madrigals played on hautboys should give him title to prescribe for future generations seldom troubled Morris. If it had, he could not have led a life of such vigor and achievement.

Instead, his medievalism, in the Victorian fashion, laid the foundation of a busy, prosperous and productive life. He detested the Renaissance, but he was close to resembling the common notion of what a many-faceted Renaissance man should be. Biographer Henderson presents a picture of Morris happily at work at his easel, humming a song that he had deciphered from a manuscript, turning aside to make a drawing on another table, sitting down to scratch out a few lines of verse or fable or jot down notes for a wallpaper design or a manifesto or a Homeric translation, then, tired at last, descending a staircase, perhaps of his own design, to bring up an armful of wine to entertain his friends at a boisterous dinner.

Few Hay Tedders. His private life was deplorable. He married Jane Burden, a beautiful but unusually stupid woman who had been his model when he was half thinking of being a painter. The daughter of a groom, she devoted most of her life to having the vapors and impersonating one of those large-eyed, long-necked ladies in the once admired paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In fact, it was Rossetti who persuaded Jane to marry Morris. Small wonder that Morris came to regard his devious painter pal as "sometimes an angel, sometimes a damned scoundrel."

Nor did Morris have much luck with his offspring. His favorite daughter was beautiful but epileptic. The other daughter nearly married George Bernard Shaw but briefly married another seedy socialist comrade of Morris, grew a mustache and took up with an androgynous lady who wore tweed knickerbockers. In later life she took to impersonating the catatonic lady of Shalott and became both custodian of and exhibit at the Morris shrine at Kelmscott Manor.

Morris dream was doomed by history. As Poet John Betjeman says of present-day England:

Where are the blithe and jocund to ted the hay? Where are the free folk of England? Where are they? Ask of the Abingdon bus with full load creeping Down into denser suburbs . . . Ask at the fish and chips in the Market Square.

Indeed, modern industrial England would be enough to make William Morris turn his face to his own wallpaper. The wallpaper itself, alas, would now be classed as high camp.

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