Watching the Loophole’s Spark

For the first two hundred forty pages of this handsome selected edition, we are girdle-deep in battle, captivity, and defeat. “The Hollow Land,” Morris’s first medievalist romance, divided into “Fytte the first,” “Fytte the second,” and so forth, relays the failed uprising of Florian and his brother Arnald of the House of the Lilies against the tyranny of the House of Red Harald; just as they die, they fall into the foggy, time-slipping Hollow Land, where they meet their old enemies once again and learn the injustice of their former cause. The dramatic lyrics of Morris’s first popular volume, The Defence of Guenevere, adapt Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and Froissart’s Chronicles to imagine characters speaking at poignant moments of conflict and loss. Her affair discovered and Lancelot gone, Morris’s Guenevere becomes her own knightly protector (“ever must I dress me to the fight”) and defends the honor of the Queen. Though her defiant speech alternates seductive reminiscences with shrill threats to haunt her accuser’s conscience forever, its arresting power is undermined by readers’ knowledge that it is all too late, and what they are witnessing is really Arthur’s realm falling apart. “The Eve of Crecy” is a song by a poor French knight, Sir Lambert de Bois, yearning for his unobtainable ideal Marguerite and hoping his horse will perform well enough before the King, wholly unaware of the mud and slaughter that tomorrow will bring. Fleeing through a storm for English territory in “The Haystack in the Floods,” the Lady Jehane is captured in a French field, and must choose between becoming her captor’s mistress or allowing the execution of her English lover. She chooses honor, the sword falls, and the poem ends, suddenly and coldly: “This was the parting that they had / Beside the haystack in the floods.” And this is before we reach the hundred-odd pages given to Morris’s gigantic adaptation of the thirteenth-century Icelandic Völsunga saga, Sigurd the Volsung, which begin with Sigmund and his sister Signy conspiring to take their protracted revenge against Signy’s treacherous husband, Siggeir, who had married her only to seize her father’s realm. Her every move under scrutiny, Signy swaps her body with a sorceress to bear the exiled Sigmund an incestuous child, Sinfiotli. When the grown boy and his father finally torch Siggeir’s fortress, Signy walks out to meet them and reveals what she has done, confessing she has lived her whole life for this revenge, before turning away from her brother and walking back into the fire in which she and all her other children must die too. Sinfiotli is then poisoned by his father’s new wife, Borghild, at a feast, though he suspects there is something wrong with the wine she passes him:

And he took the cup from her hand, nor drank, but pondered long
Of the toil that begetteth toil, and the wrong that beareth wrong.

The couplet, which Sinfiotli repeats with variations, feels like a summary of the entire saga, in which every grim-hearted victory will beget seething revenge from some relative of the defeated. Drinking nevertheless, he collapses, whereupon the “men who saw Sinfiotli deemed his heart had gotten rest, / And his eyes were no more dreadful.” It is as though the valiant hero’s life has been worse than his death.

Then, abruptly, the book brings us back to the nineteenth century with “The Lesser Arts,” Morris’s crucial lecture on decorative craft and its power to restore the British social fabric. For the following three hundred pages, there are lectures and letters on interior furnishing and the pattern-making of Morris’s unique wallpapers, on socialism and revolution, on the protection of ancient buildings, and the full texts of Morris’s time-traveling fables, A Dream of John Ball and its anarcho-utopian cousin, News from Nowhere, concluding with brief selections from the prose romances. Our familiarity now with the look of Morris & Co. shouldn’t diminish the astonishing range and capacity that these texts reveal. In 1877, Morris was still celebrated much more as a poet than a pattern-maker. Imagine Zadie Smith or Terrance Hayes suddenly branching out mid-career to launch a successful fashion collection and interior design consultancy, before becoming a union organizer for the garment-makers and the leader of a fledgling political party. Hip-hop artists have kept some of Morris’s cultural fluidity between lyrics, art, social conscience, and fashion, but even Pharrell is not heading up Louis Vuitton by learning how to weave, embroider, or dye the fabrics for himself. But if writing, weaving, printing, and protesting were all inseparable outlets for Morris’s restless energy, his friends and then his critics have wondered how they really hung together, ever since Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s little cartoon “The Bard and Petty Tradesman” showed the chubby poet hymning with his lyre to the left and turning simultaneously to face a customer over the counter on the right. What had ancient stories of chivalry and revenge to do with workers’ control of the means of production? What had the socialism to do with the soft furnishings?

The answer Morris worked out for himself begins at that mid-career pivot. “The Lesser Arts” opens with an attack on the present division of status between the free Fine arts and the commercial Decorative arts, which has spoiled them both: fabric, carpets, and carving have become “mechanical,” while paintings have lost touch with “popular arts” and become “ingenious toys for a few rich and idle men.” But the Fine/Decorative split is not inevitable, since it did not exist in the Middle Ages. It really reflects a commercial society’s division of the free mind from the functional body, and its social divisions of leisured gentlemen from hard-pressed workers. Restoring the status of decoration and craft, Morris thought, would reunite work with leisure:

To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use; that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it.

This pleasure comes with consequences. The Decorative arts had been demoted by post-Kantian aesthetic theory because they were unavoidably situated, made for use in a cathedral or on a door handle rather than as objects of free contemplation. If they are now to be re-admitted as art, then art itself now will have to involve its entire environment, not just the object. Its formal beauty and significance can never again be separated from the social and economic conditions in which it appears—and here Morris refers his listeners to Ruskin’s argument in “On the Nature of Gothic” that the wonkiness of medieval architecture is a testament to a system based on individual craftsmen rather than a failure of engineering and project management. Unless the transactions around the art are also beautiful, the art will not be art: “Art has such sympathy with cheerful freedom, open-heartedness and reality, so much she sickens under selfishness and luxury, that she will not live thus isolated and exclusive.” A commercial manufacturing society cannot produce beautiful work, not only because its technology is set up to make cheap reproductions but because its economy is set up to degrade the producers and customers of those reproductions. If we could restore the value of the handmade and the ornamental, we would transform an economy based on mechanical labor back into one based on artisanal skill, where people would want to work:

Let the arts which we are talking of beautify our labour, and be widely spread . . . and there will be pretty much an end of dull work and its wearing slavery; and no man will any longer have an excuse for talking about the curse of labour, no man will any longer have an excuse for evading the blessing of labour. . . . I protest there is nothing in the world that I desire so much as this, wrapped up, as I am sure it is, with changes political and social, that in one way or another we all desire.

The restoration of a handicraft economy would change architecture, town planning, and education, for by sensitizing the workers it would make it intolerable for them to bear “the short-sighted, reckless brutality of squalor that so disgraces our intricate civilization.” We would admire anew the pre-Renaissance past, whose looms and needles and patterns “had an inventiveness, an individuality that grander styles have never overpassed,” even if they are now in the National Gallery; we would return to the “sweet, natural and unaffected, an art of peasants rather than of merchant-princes or courtiers.” Morris demands the complete redesign not only of modern society’s furniture but its way of living and its affective character: “art will make our streets as beautiful as the woods,” he promises, and we too will live without “waste, pomp, or insolence.” This plotline, amplified and developed in all the lectures that follow, is the origin of the relentless experiments in dyeing technique and hand-printed books, as well as the socialist campaigning and News from Nowhere, his journey back to a future where cities have been dispersed, profit has been abolished, and everyone is content to garden and spin in well-wrought houses under the spreading oaks.

But it does not fully resolve the problem of the preceding two hundred forty pages. If Morris’s designs were to be the harbingers of a society free from stress and fear, why did he write so often about brutal violence and its desolate consequences, particularly for women? Ingrid Hanson’s answer, pursued in her criticism as well as the careful selection of this volume, is that Morris hated war but was fascinated by combat. “I hope we shall have leisure from war—war commercial, as well as war of the bullet and bayonet,” he concludes in “The Lesser Arts,” but if liberal capitalism is already a form of war, as he implies, then Morris needed to galvanize the resistance. Celebrating men and women who are risking everything for comradeship or honor would confront the trading spirit of the age with unflinching character and ungainsayable values. The second volume of Sigurd the Volsung tells the story of Sigurd’s slaying of Fafnir, the onetime warrior turned into a dragon by his monstrous greed—and for those reasons, Hanson’s introduction claims, Sigurd should be seen as a “fulcrum of Morris’s work rather than an idiosyncratic sidenote.”

The saga may have had effects on the curtains as well as the campaigning. Morris’s return to Old Norse poetry had been inspired by his uncomfortable two-month tour of the volcanic landscapes of Iceland; it had been “the glorious simplicity of the terrible & tragic, but beautiful land with its well-remembered stories of brave men,” he told his friend Georgiana Burne-Jones, that “killed all querulous feeling in me.” But “simplicity” was also his watchword for good interior design and the waste-free economy around it. “That which alone can produce popular art among us”—he later claims in “The Beauty of Life”—is “living a simple life,” for the “greatest foe to art is luxury.” Luxury produces the false taste of aristocratic art and the environmental disaster of the Black Country alike, Morris went on to tell his Birmingham audience, so that the modern house, with its cushions, carpets, and class divisions, is “stuffy slavery”; it made him wish he were living “in a turf hut on the Iceland hill-side.” After closing with advice on cupboards and vases, he concludes, surprisingly, “to have breasted the Spanish pikes at Leyden, to have drawn sword with Oliver [Cromwell]: that may well seem to us at times amidst the tangle of today a happy fate: for a man to be able to say, I have lived like a fool, but now I will cast away fooling for an hour, and die like a man.” Simple taste will require deadly seriousness: Morris the weaver wanted to practice art as Morris the warrior.

By proposing that Morris saw art as a form of cultural combat, this volume moves Morris’s program much closer to the twentieth-century avant-gardes than the cloistered intensities of Pre-Raphaelite interiors might suggest. The blockbuster exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde at the Tate Britain in 2012–13 promised as much with its title, but its actual conception of avant-gardism was largely limited to discussing how shocking Victorian critics found the paintings, rather than thinking through the assault on the entire cultural and economic infrastructure that the avant-gardes and Morris intended. “Avant-garde” was a label adopted by artists after the destruction of the Paris Commune who wanted to keep the fight going by other means. Seeing themselves as the troops already working in enemy-held territory, their works of art had to become small but strategic acts of sabotage against the entire system of “organised injustice,” for which acceptable art was a fig leaf. Art itself had to be destroyed in the effort to create the conditions for real art; “rather than that art should live this poor thin life,” Morris had insisted in “The Lesser Arts,” “I would that the world should indeed sweep away all art for awhile.” Like Morris, the avant-gardes tended to obliterate distinctions between an artwork and its social environment, either by exposing the cultural taste-making systems protecting the high-end paintings, as Duchamp did, or by making paintings and bus shelters side by side as the Constructivists did. They tended to make art out of the medium as well as the message, hence the little magazines and the graphic poems, or in another key, the revival of oral, chanted poetry in Schwitters and Apollinaire, both presaged by Morris’s experiments with Kelmscott typography and his bardic translations. Opposing the capitalist ideology of individual genius, they embraced ready-mades and worked by small-scale collective production, as Morris had with his early painted chairs and his embroidery teams. And if art is fundamentally at war with its society, there must be acts of destruction and forced occupation, whether destruction of the audience’s eardrums in Futurist noise machines or the sit-ins and barricades of the Situationists of Paris 1968. The wholesale transformation of social life that we seek, Morris told the anniversary meeting of the Paris Commune in 1885, cannot any longer be done by persuasion: it can only happen “by the threat of force, or, if it must be, by its action.”

But the worst fate an avant-garde can suffer is to become a marker of refined taste for the upper middle classes. If it feels jarring to call Morris an avant-gardist, it is because the war stayed within the poems and the socialist agitation, leaving the tapestries and stained glass sumptuous and desirable. Morris did not do the wrenching jolts of modernism, and as a decorative artist could only make money by at the same time furnishing the houses of the wealthy, an irony which sometimes drove him to fury. When his patron Isaac Lowthian Bell asked him why he was stamping round Bell’s new Arts and Crafts mansion, Rounton Grange, in a rage, Morris turned on him like a wild animal, saying, “It is only that I spend my life ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.” Despite Morris’s mission to bring back a craft society where “all people shared in art,” the workers at his Merton factory could still never have afforded the wallpapers he was selling to pay their above-average wages. To point out the irony, the artist David Mabb has recently remade some of Morris’s wallpapers, replacing the flower pistils with the kopecks and beer bottle caps of Alexander Rodchenko, the Constructivist who used these common objects as part of his public designs. But the irony cuts both ways: Mabb’s own protest now lies within the realm of high art, protected in the print room of the Tate Gallery, and you cannot buy it in rolls from Home Depot. 

Morris was adamant that his attempts at profit-sharing and fair trade were signs of a better future rather than its accomplishment. A competitive society would always reproduce class privilege in one form or another, and gradual wage reform or even state socialism would merely temper its worst effects. Only a wholesale removal of the forces that encourage people’s sense of mutual rivalry would really bring the system down. In A Dream of John Ball, the peasant leader is horrified to learn that in the industrial future which the narrator reveals to him his dream will have come true, and “poor men shall be able to become lords and masters.” But the new lords will adopt the ways of their former masters, and “their eyes shall be blinded to the robbing of themselves by others, because they shall hope in their souls that they may each live to rob others: and this shall be the very safeguard of all rule and law in those days.” This is Morris’s brief summary of capitalism, and Ball says ruefully, “it shall bring hell up on to the earth.” Under the guise of the progress of civilization, he thought it had colonized half the Earth in search of resources to extract, set off a gigantic system of international rivalry, and poisoned the rivers, while taking away all of life’s real pleasures:

It keeps us sweating and terrified for our livelihood, unable to read a book, or look at a picture, or have pleasant fields to walk in . . . and for what? that we may go on living the same slavish life till we die, in order to provide for a rich man what is called a life of ease and luxury. . . . We have toiled and groaned and died in making poison and destruction for our fellow-men. Well, I say all this is war.

News from Nowhere is Morris’s attempt to imagine what it would be like if the war were over. He had read his fellow socialist Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a utopia set in the year 2000, and was revolted by its vision of what he saw as a society of gigantic state-owned factories with the workers like “a huge standing army, tightly drilled, compelled by some mysterious fate to unceasing anxiety for the production of wares to satisfy every caprice.” This earthly paradise was only meaningless middle-class comfort ensured by monopoly; for all its communism, it lacked any feeling of community life. “Individual men cannot shuffle off the business of life on to the shoulders of an abstraction called the State,” he warned, “but must deal with it in conscious association with each other,” an association for which art would be “indispensable.” In News from Nowhere, his avatar falls asleep in grimy Hammersmith by its ugly suspension bridge, and wakes up to a London where cottage gardens stretch down to the sparkling river and boatmen willingly row you out for a swim. Gradually he learns how the Britain of 2090 had become a society of contented craftspeople after the protracted civil wars of the 1950s. There is no profit, no property, and no money. Everything is made by neighbors for neighbors, because people have realized that making is real pleasure, home-grown means healthy, and labor is just good exercise; even the road-mending parties don’t lack for strapping volunteers. There is no unemployment, no hurry, and no real difference between work and leisure, giving the whole thing the atmosphere of a jolly holiday camp. Children learn by doing rather than by forced rote learning; marriages come and go by mutual arrangement, and there is no elaborate system of government, no police or army. In this thoroughly decentralized world, all the top-down forces that made for war have been removed, leaving peace the default setting: “It would be possible for us to contend with and rob each other,” one character admits, “but it would be harder for us than refraining from strife and robbery.”

How plausible you find this depends on how much you accept Morris’s explanation of what we suffer from. Morris was a maker, and, holding with Marx that the value of things is really determined by the labor that went into making them, had little time to consider the emergence of William Stanley Jevons’s marginal utility theory, in which value is determined by scarcity and demand—desires whose pliability and mutual reactivity would be the foundation for neoclassical economics and the modern consumer economy. Morris thought that most things for sale in his own day were just shoddy money-making opportunities; if profit were abolished, “people could have what they wanted, instead of what the profit-grinders at home and abroad forced them to take.” But what if the things the people wanted were in conflict with each other, or remained too various and complex for any local system to supply? In “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” Morris divides society into the idle rich and the hard-pressed workers, leaving professional intermediates like doctors and lawyers simply the “parasites of property.” He has no place for the service industries, which shape desires, manage complex manufacturing chains, gather people’s attention, or mediate conflict. News from Nowhere is therefore blessedly free of corporate compliance officers and telemarketers, but it does not imagine the prospect of people wanting to eat at a Chinese restaurant or listen to a symphony. People’s bodies are so attractive and healthy that no one seems to need medicine. The houses are beautifully furnished, but it is not clear how they are heated, or whether there will be chocolate to eat as well as turnips come rainy February. At one point Morris sees a mysterious “force-barge” heading up the Thames with no visible means of propulsion, but what the kryptonite that propels it is, or how its clean power can be managed without starting further resource wars, is left unexplored.

Yet even in this society of perpetual peace, traces of violence remain. “We have got rid of the scowling envy, coupled by the poets with hatred,” Morris’s interlocutor Hammond boasts. “Success in besting our neighbours is a road to renown now closed.” But ten lines later Hammond pounces “with some exultation” when he catches his nineteenth-century visitor making a foolish proposition. “Nonsense,” he retorts, “somewhat snappishly,” to another suggestion that a localized society must be a homogenized one. If there are frequent flashes of temper in the old man’s conversation, there is also clearly relish in his description of the bloody confrontations between the worker-rebels and the government army that brought the downfall of the profit system:

“‘The rebels’ at least felt themselves strong enough to build up the world again from its dry bones,—and they did it too!” said the old man, his eyes glittering under his beetling brows. He went on: “And their opponents at least and at last learned something about the reality of life, and its sorrows, which they—their class, I mean—had once known nothing of. In short, the two combatants, the workman and the gentleman, between them—”

“Between them,” said I, quickly, “they destroyed commercialism!”

“Yes, yes, YES,” said he; “that is it. Nor could it have been destroyed otherwise.”

Violence was necessary to teach the privileged their final lesson—though there is clearly still plenty of class hatred left in Morris’s narrator when he reflects on the “hideous vulgarity of the cockney villas” that once lined the Thames, the ugly work of rich men reflecting “the sordidness and bareness of life which they forced on the poor people.” Though the subtitle of News from Nowhere is “An Epoch of Rest,” its vision is really founded on Morris’s restless fury at the squalor and waste of the lives that surrounded him. “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things,” Morris admits in “How I Became a Socialist,” “the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilisation.” His energy for socialism—endless speeches to grimy half-deserted halls, standing bail for protesters, large donations, and even short spells in prison himself—were heroic acts for a cause that his conscience would not allow him to shirk. But sometimes the thwarted rage of the interior decorator pokes through, like the spring in a badly upholstered sofa. Hanson includes a previously uncollected speech called “Unattractive Labour,” which bemoans the way that in a profit system “ugliness is the rule” for houses, clothing, and furniture. “I know that to many people this will seem a small matter, because only those (and how few they are!) who can make their surroundings decent can understand the full horror, the dullness and poverty of life which it involves,” he goes on, but “I say without shrinking that the bloodiest of violent revolutions would be a light price to pay for the righting of this wrong.” If only the Reign of Terror or the Khmer Rouge had led to better taste in wallpaper, the deaths of millions would have been well worthwhile.

This is not a selection for people looking for clues about Morris’s disappointing marriage to his moody Pre-Raphaelite model, Jane Burden. Their life is present by omission: it was Morris’s long tour of Iceland that offered Dante Gabriel Rossetti the opportunity to supply the affection she had been missing—reasons, perhaps, for the interest in masculine bonding in Sigurd, or men’s relentless betrayals. But there are few personal letters here and none of the mid-career lyrics which offer the biographers suggestions, only the high-quality early poems and their fascination with love triangles. Nor is this the volume for those looking for sources of Tolkien and the fantasy genre within the long poems or the later prose romances. The selections from The House of the Wolfings and The Sundering Flood are brief and not obviously salient, other than the mention of Mirkwood, and the latter’s allegory of a “just war” is lost with the many missing episodes. This volume excels instead at revealing the politics of Morris’s designs, and the personal energies that went into them. He never saw socialism or a craft economy realized, and Etsy can no more bridge the gap between them than Morris & Co. could. Nor can the poems, whose vast length and ornate diction were meant to offer experiences of living in beautifully patterned and well-spent time, the interweaving plots and rhythms no less complex than the making of the tapestries. But the irreversible modern taste for direct speech and capitalism’s perpetual to-do list now make them a labor to get through. The memorable parts are actually where the rolling hexameters and archaic address give way to the perception of something as it seems to be happening. “In Prison” is the sigh of a captive listening all day to the wind flapping the flags and banner poles of his enemy’s fortress:

While, all alone
Watching the loophole’s spark,
Lie I, with life all dark,
Feet tether’d, hands fetter’d
Fast to the stone.

“Loophole” brilliantly combines the medieval meaning of “arrow-slit” with the more modern legal sense, aligning this prisoner with the desperation of anyone looking for a way out. But if his poems are unlikely to offer an escape, Morris’s rage at environmental destruction, his conviction that we should aim for national happiness, not G.N.P., and his deep sense that the current system is a fraud designed to make most people lose makes him a prophet for Generation Z. Midway through A Dream of John Ball, the narrator finds himself pondering “how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.” Morris’s struggle is not over yet.