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In Praise of William Morris
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The Socialist League There was a factional dust-devil at the Federation in 1885 as the drive for Socialism gathered people and problems -something about the secession of a body of EEdinburgh socialists from the Federation with the result that Wm Morris found himself at the head of something called the Socialist League you can look it up in the leaflets and position papers of the era 6. Friends were amazed, and some alarmed, that he was working to destroy the economic system that saw the 
invest in images & artThe art crowd was like a fluffy salad of talking endives whose moneyed onions made sure a favored painter thrived. Down in the garden of art the dancing money lurks but please don't stand against a war with the Turks So William Morris left the jive of the endive the pleasant ride of the scholar-designer to take the bumpy road from medieval reveler to analytic Marx and the ancient Leveller however much for an aesthete and lover of beauty he perforce had to face the shabbiness and out-of-luck-and-pluck in the big neighborhoods of English cities 7. A Stink-Bomb from Right Wingers In 1885 Morris gave a talk "in a music-room in Holywell" at Oxford in which he spoke of Socialism Young right wingers yowled and beat their feet on the floor at his words Then they moved toward the stage Someone had a bottle of a stinky chemical which they opened and spread in fumes of vom-vom to kill the meeting 8. Bloody Sunday The weather was bleak and gloomy of the sort to damp down revolutionary ire Economic depression had knocked people out of work The workers were upset The issue of the Irish and the way the gov't dealt with the Irish were a factor in the disquietude Thousands were set to converge upon Trafalgar Square from several directions William Morris was one of the marchers The gov't had ordered the police and troops to kill the march They attacked and sent it scattering during which one young man, Alfred Linnell, was wounded and died a few weeks later |
Morris's speech at the young man's funeral had a theme of bread and roses 25 years before the great strike at the cloth mills of Lawrence, Mass came up with the historic banner "We want bread and roses too" He said, "....if society had been differently constituted, his life might have been a delightful, a beautiful and a happy one It is our business to organize.... to try to make this earth a beautiful and happy place That's what we should do find Alfred's gravesite and place there loaves and roses day 'pon day till bread and the flowers of fun bescent each place beneath the sun 9. Then in 1889 some avowed anarchists got control of the Socialist League and voted Morris out of power Thereafter, in the words of William Gaunt it became a "small and bitter sect" Welcome, o sect, to the tens of thousands of leftist hickory cudgels gathered in the great cudgel-stands of dusty hallways by empty meeting rooms 10. He spent the last seven years of his life going out in a blaze of publishing He founded the Kelmscott Press for which he designed type, selected the best of papers and worked with the best artists His last great work was a famous edition of Chaucer with Edward Burne-Jones doing the drawings for the woodcuts Ahh, Sun-Flower, weary of time It took him five years to publish the Kelmscott Chaucer -a folio in pigskin with a silver clasp Yeats termed it the "most beautiful book in the world" A blaze of publishing so that the socialist publisher could die at 62 that October of '96 in the monumentality of his time-track. Praise William Morris but please know this: Great art and socialism still can kiss Great art & egalité bread and bliss -Edward Sanders April 2007 __________________________________________________________ |
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