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In Praise of William Morris Poet, Publisher, Artist, Designer, Furniture Maker, Socialist Page 1 Click Here for page 2 |
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You have to admit he was groovy, in the hipster sense (say around 1959) this William Morris He made things, well-limned and beauteous and sold them in his shop He had a genius for design and form a high metabolism and hundreds of projects He was very very sympathetic to the struggling worker and was driven to the barricades by the rage-stirring question: "How could people starve in a culture of plenty?" 
They still sell his wallpapers in fancy catalogues Rich people forgive forays into communism from the guard towers of the commune of ultrawealth. In the late 1870s and early '80s Morris became a Socialist It was what William Gaunt termed "Pre-Raphaelite Socialism" —that "everyone should be an artist" as in "art is the expression of pleasure in labour" as in why not cut the haikus of Basho on the woodsman's axe The way Morris saw it the world was riven with Commercial War State 'gainst State & Seller v. Seller 
and the  v. those who toil for wagesIt was a way of keeping the Machine in Check! If hand-fashioning could be done as effectively and pleasantly for the worker as by a machine then set aside the machine! King Arthur's Round Table so symbolic to the painters and poets was a paradigm for communism it seemed to Wm Morrisk * who wrote "My business is to stir up revolution" and so he gifted his skills upon the Muse of Pamphleteering as surely and steadily as, say, George Bernard Shaw several decades later. In 1883 Morris signed on with the Democratic Federation just about the only overt socialist group around It soon changed its name to the Social Democratic Federation to make its politics more translucent CB Follett ________________________________ |
3. William Morris, to his garlanded praise in the time-track began to walk the talk He even sold some rare books to pay for socialist pamphlets In Socialism he sought the unblemished beauty of religion and antique form but of course he ran headlong into the World of Splinters Careerists and Twisting Factions and also the brutalized facts of the masses who even today would have preferred the fumes of NASCAR to the utter thrill of the Rouen cathedral. If he had stuck in his lectures to Art it would not have created hostility but there's nothing quite like raising the banners of the Left to bring on the snarls of the press, the hostility of acquaintances and the dismaying disorder of the Inside Ahh, factions! How Many Factions can You Fit on a Bristle of a Printing Press Inking Brush? Answer: plenty as many as there are foxed old pamphlets in the British Museum 4. Some of the Origins Thomas Carlyle's 1843 Past and Present on the Chartist movement in a time of "great industrial distress" One of the remedies was the concept of escaping  to find ideas for reform John Ruskin writing fiercely of "industrial wrong" just as writers in other countries scalded the "political wrong" William Morris was fueled by the Middle ages and began to make glass, fabrics, chairs, tables as if a medieval craftsperson-   that Morris foresaw as surely as his hand shaped brilliance |
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