Victorian Renaissance Man

By ROBERT HUGHES

WILLIAM MORRIS by E.P. THOMPSON 829 pages. Pantheon. $17.95.

Of all the Victorians, William Morris perhaps came closest to filling the outline of that egregious myth, the Renaissance Man. Only his socialist convictions made him turn down the post of Poet Laureate after Tennyson died. He translated the Icelandic sagas into English, wrote News from Nowhere, one of the best Utopian novels in the history of that genre, and was a charter member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. With John Ruskin, he was an influential agitator for maintaining the integrity of the architectural past; dozens of developers and architectural opportunists had cause to fear the voice of the Anti-Scrape, as Morris called his Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.

Connective Tissue. He was the greatest designer of his age. Morris' workshops at Red House and Kelmscott offered as radical a challenge to English mass fabrication with its textiles, furniture and printed papers as, 70 years later, the Bauhaus would present to industrial manufacture in the 20th century. As book printer, weaver of tapestries, furniture designer and stained-glass worker, Morris consistently turned out the best work of anyone in Victorian England. Moreover, he was one of the century's major social thinkers.

Yet within 50 years of his death in 1896, the man's reputation had shrunk to a few yards of chintz and flowered wallpaper. This forceful and articulate genius had receded into a green limbo where Pre-Raphaelite ghosts lisped harmlessly to one another. He was posthumously seen as a backward-looking fabulist, a quaint Victorian period piece. The visions of a great radical socialist were diminished and finally lost. Yet in life they absorbed his greatest energies. "There is no salvation for the unemployed," he wrote in 1887, "but in the general combination of the workers for the freedom of labor--for the REVOLUTION." This belief permeates the 24 volumes of Morris' collected works. Rebellion was the connective tissue of his life. For reclamation, Morris needed the attentions of a Marxist historian: that event did not come until 1955, with the publication of Edward Thompson's William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary.

The book sank. Republished two decades later, it surfaces in a changed environment. Morris is the patron saint of all craftsmen and communards; interest in his work has revived and a new public exists for him. In the meantime, E.P. Thompson has emerged as one of England's leading historians. This was his first book; his second, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), proved to be a classic--the most ambitious and imaginative study of English social history in a generation. Thompson's theme is the self-determination of labor: the story of the "swinish multitude"--as Edmund Burke called the laboring poor of England--bringing itself to consciousness as a class. It is further proclaimed in William Morris. Morris' career came late in this epic transformation. The socialist demonstrators whose Chicago-style smashing by the London police he witnessed in Trafalgar Square on "Bloody Sunday" 1887 were the grandchildren of the Chartists. Nevertheless Morris was a key figure in the history of English socialism, and Thompson's is the first biography to do justice to his political thought and so assemble the man whole.

William Morris was the son of a rich man, but from adolescence he felt an aesthetic revulsion against the excremental abundance of capitalist production. If that was civilization, he wanted none of it. "Was it all to end," he memorably demanded, "in a counting-house on 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 contented together, though the pleasure of the eyes was gone from the world, and the place of Homer was to be taken by Huxley?" The alternative, for Morris at Oxford, was a kind of dream world of medievalism from which he soon escaped. Launcelot and Guenevere, banners and flowery meads--no social program could be hung on that; what extracted Morris from Pre-Raphaelite sentiment was the growing resonance he felt between craft practice and socialist thought. No theory of art, the practical aesthete realized, could be effective without a corresponding theory of society.

In this way the instinctive socialism of Morris' early lectures and craft practice blossomed into what he called "a matter of religion." In 1876 the man who had decorated the Armour and Tapestry Room at St. James's Palace made his irrevocable gran rifiuto: he resigned his family directorship in the Devon Great Consols Company, placed his silk top hat, sym bol of capital, on a chair, and sat on it. (Perhaps only in Victorian England can one imagine this gesture bearing any moral weight.) For the next 20 years he wore himself out, organizing socialist groups, speaking, demonstrating, writing millions of words, while maintaining the vita activa of the workshops and the Kelmscott Press. Not until 1883 did William Morris read Marx; all his arguments about the alienation of workers arose from his own experience.

For Morris was not, as his detractors suppose, a daft Luddite with pretechnological dreams of a feudal society sans feudal authority. "It is not this or that tangible steam or brass machine which we want to get rid of," he remarked, "but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny which oppresses the lives of all of us." It was not the machine but its owners who converted skilled into unskilled labor. When Morris advocated "simplicity," he was not calling for a peevish and cloistered asceticism but for a clearing away of inessentials. "I demand a free and unfettered animal life for man first of all: I demand the utter extinction of all asceticism. If we feel the least degradation in being amorous, or merry, or hungry, or sleepy, we are so far bad animals, and therefore miserable men." Thompson's book is not only the standard biography of Morris; it makes us realize, as no other writer has done, how completely admirable a man this Victorian was -- how consistent, how honest to himself and others, how inca pable of cruelty or jargon and, above all, how free. Robert Hughes

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