society. The biographer Mackail has said of him that he devoted the whole of his extraordinary powers towards no less an object than the reconstitution of the civilised life of mankind. That is true, and it had never been true of any artist before him; at least no artist had ever been turned from his art to politics because he was an artist. Morris was so turned; and for that reason he is the chief representative of that æsthetic discontent which is peculiar to that time.
One might have expected that he would be the last man to feel it; since he could himself make whatever beautiful things he wanted. Not only could he express his desire for beauty in poetry, but he could also express his own ideas of beauty in the work of his hands. However ugly the world outside him might be, he could make an earthly Paradise for himself, and could enjoy all the happiness of the artist in doing so. There are some men of great gifts who can never be content with their exercise; but Morris was as happy in making any of the hundred different things that he made so well as a child is happy at play. He knew early in life what he wanted to do; and he was as free as any man could be to do it. At the age of twenty-one he became his own master, with a comfortable fortune. His father was dead; and, though his mother had cherished the hope that he would become a bishop, she suffered her disappointment quietly. He began at once to practice several arts, and satisfied both himself and the public in his practice of them. So he had no quarrel with the world so far as his own well-being was concerned; indeed he can be compared, for universal good fortune, only with his famous contemporary Leo Tolstoy. And he was like Tolstoy too in this, that his private happiness could neither enervate nor satisfy him. Some men rebel against society because they are unhappy; but Tolstoy and Morris put away their happiness to rebel. Each of them in his own earthly Paradise, heard the voice of unhappiness outside it; each saw evil in the world which made his own good intolerable to him.
They rebelled for different reasons; and to many they have both seemed irrational in their rebellion, for they were both drawn from work for which they had genius to work for which they had none. Tolstoy was not born to be a saint, nor was Morris born to be a revolutionary, and the world has lamented the perverse waste of natural powers which their rebellion caused. Indeed, in the case of Morris it has seemed to many that he quarreled with the world on a trivial point. To them art is a pleasant ornament of life; but if, for some reason, it is one that society at present cannot excel in, they are well content to do without it, much more content than they would be to do without golf or sport. To them Morris is merely a man who made a great fuss about his own particular line of business. Naturally there was nothing like leather to him; but men in another line of business cannot be expected to pay much heed to him.
Morris himself, however, held that art is everybody’s business, whether they are themselves artists or not. And by art he, like Ruskin, did not mean merely pictures or statues. Indeed, he thought little of these compared with all the work of men’s hands that used to be beautiful in the past and now is ugly. The ugliness of houses, tables and chairs, clothes, cups and saucers, in fact of everything that men made, whether they tried to make it beautiful or were content that it should be ugly – this universal ugliness at first troubled him like a physical discomfort without his knowing why. And at first he, being himself a man of action and an artist, merely tried to make beautiful things for himself and others. But gradually he came to see that this single artistic effort of his would avail nothing in a world of ugliness, that all the conditions of our society favoured ugliness and thwarted beauty. He saw, too, from his own experience, that beauty was a symptom of happy work and ugliness of unhappy; and so he became aware that, our society was troubled by a new kind of discontent, which it expressed in the ugliness of all that it made.
5. William Frend De Morgan (for the design) and Sands End Pottery (for the production), Panel, 1888–1897. Buff-coloured earthenware, with painting over a white slip, 61.4 × 40.5 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
6. The Months of the Year, 1863–1864. Hand-painted tiles. Old Hall, Queens College, Cambridge.
7. Edward Burne-Jones and Lucy Faulkner, Sleeping Beauty, 1862–1865. Hand-painted on tin-glazed earthenware tiles, 76.2 × 120.6 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
This he knew, as no one else knew it, from his own happiness in his work and the beauty through which he expressed it. If he had been a poet alone, he might never have known it except as a theory of Ruskin’s; but being a worker in twenty different crafts he knew it more surely than Ruskin himself; and the knowledge became intolerable to him, so that he seemed to himself to be a mere idler while he was only doing his own work and enjoying his own happiness in it. He could not rest until he had tried to show other men the happiness they had lost, whether they were rich or poor, whether they were toiling without joy themselves or living on the joyless labour of others. Many men have rebelled against society and have preached rebellion because of the fearful contrast between riches and poverty; but it was not poverty that made Morris rebel so much as the nature of the work, which in our time most poor men have to do. He believed that their work was joyless as it never had been before; and that, not poverty, was to him the peculiar evil of their time against which, as a workman himself, he rebelled and wished the poor to rebel. They knew, of course, that they were poor, but they were not aware of this peculiar penalty of their poverty; and he was determined to make both them and the rich aware of it. He would open men’s eyes to the meaning of his prevailing ugliness. He would make the rich see that they too were poorer than a peasant of the thirteenth century, in that there was no beauty of their own time in which they could take delight as if it were a general happiness, but only an ugliness that must dispirit them like a general unhappiness.
So he turned from his art to preach to men like a prophet; the value of his preaching lay in the fact that he was attacking a new evil that had grown up while men were unaware of it. And because the evil was new, they paid little attention to him at first; for men are as conservative in their discontents as in other things, and civilisation is always being threatened by new dangers while they are thinking of the old. To Morris the chief danger of our civilisation seemed to be the growth of a barbarism caused by joyless labour and of a discontent that did not know its cause. He feared lest the great mass of men should gradually come to believe that our society was not worth the sacrifices that were made for it; indeed, he sometimes hoped that it would be destroyed by this belief. Yet he was determined to do his best to save it, if it could be saved and transformed. For, as Mackail puts it, he believed that it could not be saved except by a reconstitution of the civilised life of mankind. The rich must learn to love art more than riches, and the poor to hate joyless work more than poverty. There must be a change in values that would mean a change of heart; and Morris did not despair of that change. Yet he knew that he was alone in his efforts to bring it about; for though he consorted and worked with other Socialists, his desires and hopes, and therefore his methods, were different from theirs. They were, many of them, able and devoted men who hoped by means of organisation to change the economic structure of society so that there should be no more very rich or very poor. Among these he was like a saint among ecclesiastics; for he desired something far beyond a more equal distribution of wealth, and he would not have been at all content with a world in which men lived and worked as they do now but without extreme poverty or riches. Other Socialists protested against the present waste of our superfluous energy; he told men what they might do with their superfluous energy when they had ceased to waste it. There is a common notion, favoured by the books of writers like Bellamy, that a Socialist state would be dull, with every one living as people live now in a prosperous middle-class suburb. Indeed, Bellamy tells us with prophetic rapture that in his Utopia there will be no need of umbrellas since there will be porticos over all the side-ways in every town. But Morris wanted something more in a reorganised society than a municipal substitute for umbrellas. It is one of the worst failures of our society that it has forgotten pleasure for comfort; that it thinks more of the armchair than of the dance. Morris tried to make men wish, like himself, for pleasure more than for comfort, and in the Utopia that he dreamt of, there were armchairs for the old, no doubt, but dancing for the young. Indeed, in his ideal state all life and all labour would be a kind of dance rather than a comfortable and torpid repose. That is to say, every activity of man would be made delightful