The Aesthetic Movement || THE ODD MAN OUT: MORRIS AMONG THE AESTHETES

The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present

THE ODD MAN OUT: MORRIS AMONG THE AESTHETESAuthor(s): Peter FaulknerSource: The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850 - the Present, No. 34, The AestheticMovement (2010), pp. 76-91Published by: The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the PresentStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41809425 .

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THE ODD MAN OUT

MORRIS AMONG THE AESTHETES

Peter Faulkner

It will

is an

place

interesting

the design

and

work

paradoxical

of William

fact

Morris,

that any

from

account

the early

of late

1860s

nineteenth-century

through to his death

cultural

in 1896,

history

as will place the design work of William Morris, from the early 1860s through to his death in 1896, as

of central importance to the contemporary Aesthetic Movement, but that Morris himself had nothing

but contempt for that Movement (Fig. 1). As William Gaunt put it in his entertaining account of the

Movement in 1945:

On the whole, the Aesthetic Movement was a

comedy of errors. 'You want us to be cultured?' said the middle class in effect. 'This then is what

you mean?' throwing itself into a posture which was both serious and ridiculous. And noone was much advantaged or satisfied. To the average Briton it was all vaguely effeminate and

unhealthy. To Whistler it was a barbarous

mockery of severe and exacting artistic principles. To William Morris and his associates it was the

opposite of their energetic creed in which the mere appreciation of art had no place.1 (Fig. 2)

It is the purpose of the present article to look

again at this situation to see to what extent recent

scholarship has changed our understanding of this

piece of cultural history. There is plenty of evidence for Morris's

hostility to the Aesthetic outlook, which sprang from his Ruskinian view of the place of art in

society. Thus he expressed disbelief in what we

may see as.the aesthetic attitude in his lecture

FIG.l William Morris, by Frederic ^ Holly er, 1874; Daisy wallpaper by Morris & Co, 1864 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

'The Art of the People' in February 1879. He

regretted that the art of his own time was available

only to a small minority of the people, an elite

priding itself on keeping 'the common herd' out of its 'palace of art':

It would be a pity to waste many words on the

prospect of such a school of art as this, which does in a way, theoretically at least, exist at present, and has for its watchword a piece of slang that does not mean the harmless thing it seems to mean - art for art's sake. Its foredoomed end must be, that art at last will seem too delicate a

thing for even the hands of the initiated to touch; and the initiated must at last sit still and do"

nothing - to the grief of no one.2

The phrase to which Morris takes exception was comparatively new in English. Its first use is often credited to the francophile Algernon Swinburne (Fig. 3) in his Life of William Bla'e in

1868, adopting the phrase 7J art pour l'art' used by Gautier and Baudelaire. As R V Johnson puts it,

parts of the second chapter constitute 'the first

unequivocal and sustained exposition in English of art for art's sake'.3 There is a good deal of irony in the fact that the phrase that Morris disliked should

77



FIG.2 ( opposite ) Songsheet cover, designed by Alfred Concanen (1835-1886), and published by Hopwood & Crew, satirising the Aesthete's style of hair, dress and the Movement's taste for blue and white china and sunflowers, circa 1881. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2010

FIG. 3 (below) Algernon Swinburne, by Carlo Ape' Pellegrini published Vanity Fair, 21 November 1874, as part of a series

' Men of the Day' © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

have been put into currency by Swinburne, who had met Morris in Oxford in 1857, greatly admired his early poetry, and was a frequent visitor to Red House in the early 1860s.4

The other major figure of emerging aestheticism in the 1870s was the young Oxford

don, Walter Pater (1839-1894), and there is irony too in the fact that one of Paters earliest reviews, in October 1868, was of Morris's poetry. In it Pater

eloquently discussed the recently published first volume of The Earthly Paradise, which he

compared and contrasted with The Defence of Guenevere of 1858 and The Life and Death of Jason in 1867. It is a remarkable and perceptive review, with an extraordinary conclusion in which Pater relates the spirit conveyed in the poems - 'the continual suggestion. . .of the shortness of life. . .the desire of beauty quickened by the sense of death' -

and 'modern philosophy', with its tendency to

'regard all things as inconstant modes or fashions'.5 The last four eloquent pages of the review refer no more to Morris or his poetry, but take us into a meditation on life. That these pages were of central

importance to Pater is shown by the fact that he detached them from the review, and used them as the 'Conclusion' to his first book, Studies in the

History of the Renaissance, published in 1873. In this form they became very well known - indeed,

embarrassingly so for Pater, as they were denounced in Oxford as irresponsible if not exactly immoral. They were certainly challenging in an Oxford whose conventional ethos was to encourage young men to think about their duty, not to themselves but to God and the Queen, Christianity and the British Empire. Pater withdrew the Conclusion from the second edition of the book,

published under the more accurate title The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry in 1 877. He later explained: 'This brief "Conclusion" was omitted in the second edition of this book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those

young men into whose hands it might fall'.6 It was restored in the third edition of 1893. But what

exactly did the Conclusion say to arouse this

7»



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controversy in 1873? Paters argument was that modern philosophy showed the world to be in state of 'continual vanishing away' and the self to be in a state of 'perpetual weaving and unweaving'.7 In this flux, the only salvation is to be found in vivid

experiences. 'Failure is to form habits'. We must avoid 'a stereotyped world' and respond to whatever is most powerfully present to us. The reader is encouraged to seek experience that will

yield as its fruit of 'a quickened, multiplied consciousness'. Pater concludes: 'Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.'8 This is probably the most eloquent.expression of the aesthetic ideal ever

written; it is indeed ironic that it should first h^ve

appeared in a review of poetry by a man who

repudiated that ideal - and who probably never read the review.

In the five years between the publication of Pater's review and that of The Renaissance , critics

seeking a new school of poetry to succeed to those of Browning and Tennyson (who had been Poet Laureate since 1850) often grouped together Morris, Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The three poets were mutually acquainted, and when Rossetti (Fig. 4) brought out his Poems in

1870, he persuaded both Swinburne and Morris to write reviews. Thus it was not surprising that the

anonymous, attack on 'The Fleshly School of

Poetry' in The Contemporary Review in October

1871, although directed mainly at Rossetti, should also have included Swinburne and Morris:

He [Rossetti] cannot tell a pleasant story like Mr.

Morris, nor forge alliterative thunderbolts like Mr. Swinburne. It must be conceded, nevertheless, that he is neither so glibly imitative as the one, nor so transcendentally superficial as the other.9

Another critic, W J Courthope, reviewed the three poets together in 1872, in an article entitled

FIGA Dante Gabriel Rossetti , photographed by Lewis Carroll, 1863 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

'The Latest Developments of Literary Poetry'. His use of the term 'literary' emphasises the charge he

brings against the poets, particularly Morris and

Rossetti, that they have turned away from the

contemporary world into a world of art.10 Later, Earle Welby was to argue that the 'republican zeal' of Swinburne's early poetry was diverted away from

politics for some eight or nine years by the apolitical influence of Rossetti, Morris and Burne-Jones, before showing itself again dramatically again in 1871 in Songs before Sunrise .n It is another irony in this complex story that Morris should figure here as an opponent of art's engagement with the world.

In a less polemical way than Buchanan or

Courthope, the liberal critic, John Morley, in 1873 also linked the three poets, as he described

favourably the development of a new attitude in

contemporary culture:

8o




Then Mr. Ruskin came, and the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Morris, now lastly a critic like Mr. Pater, all with their faces averted from theology, most of them indeed blessed with a simple and happy unconsciousness of the very existence of the conventional gods.12

Morley does not make it clear to what these 'faces averted from theology' might be directing their attention, but an obvious answer would be to

art, especially, through Pater, to the high art created by the geniuses of the Renaissance like Leonardo and Michelangelo.

Nothing could have been further from the

conception of art put forward by Ruskin in works like The Stones of Venice (1851-3) and followed by Morris. This conception saw the Middle Ages as the

great era of art in Europe, because the Gothic spirit gave the opportunity for numerous workmen to

express themselves creatively in their work; art was

principally a matter of architecture and the associated crafts. Morris read Ruskin at Oxford, and consistently expressed his indebtedness to Ruskin s ideas. So it was in 1892 that, having established the Kelmscott Press, Morris decided to

print and publish on its own what he saw as the seminal chapter of The Stones of Venice, 'The Nature of Gothic', which he described in his Preface as 'one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century'.13 In The Stones

of Venice Ruskin presented medieval Venice as a

happy cooperative community of active citizens, which was to be destroyed historically by the

development of commerce and individualism, the

very development that produced the masterpieces applauded by Pater. It was the communal definition of art that appealed to Morris, and his experience as a craftsman confirmed his sense that in the good society men would find fulfilment in their daily work. The production of a few masterpieces could in no way make up for the absence of pleasure in labour for all members of the community.

Morris's ideas in this area hardly changed, although they took on an increasingly political

orientation. His visits to Iceland in 1871 and 1873, and his work in translating Icelandic literature and

expressing something of its spirit in Sigurd the

Volsung in 1876, strengthened him psychologically as he saw with admiration the courage of the

ordinary Icelandic people sustaining an admirable

lifestyle under the most inauspicious conditions. As the 1870s advanced, Morris became more involved in public activities. He reformed the business, founded as Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co in

1862, assuming greater responsibility with its reconstitution in 1875 as Morris & Co.

He joined the Eastern Question Association in 1876 to oppose Disraeli's government's policy in

response to the crisis in Bulgaria and the Ottoman

Empire. In 1877 his indignation about the growing fashion for the 'restoration' of works of architectural merit led him to found and take an active part in the

Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. In the same year he gave his first public lecture, 'The Decorative Arts', later renamed 'The Lesser Arts' -

an interesting change in that it was Morris's Ruskinian contention that no one kind of art should be considered higher or better than any other. In the conclusion of the lecture he expressed his ideal of a

society brought about by the released creative spirit of future generations

That art [the popular art of the future] will make our streets as beautiful as the woods, as elevating as the mountain-sides: it will be a pleasure and a

rest, and not a weight upon the spirits to come from the open country into a town; every man's house will be fair and decent, soothing to his mind and helpful to his work. . . in no private dwelling will there be any signs of waste, pomp, or insolence, and every man will have his share of the best. 14

It was not long after, in February 1879, that Morris delivered 'The Art of the People', with its

explicit criticism of aestheticism quoted earlier. It is important to locate Morris's views within

the social context, in which increasing incomes for the middle classes made possible a great expansion

8i




of consumer demand, resulting in a widening range of manufactured products and the

development of new outlets for selling them.

Harvey and Press record the opening of Gamage's in 1858, John Lewis's in 1864 and Liberty's - to become closely associated with Aestheticism - in 1875. 15 They also record Morris's increasing concern to attract more customers by expanding the range of products around the time of the

reorganization of the firm as Morris & Co, in 1875, followed by the opening of its important shop in Oxford Street in 1877. Walter Crane recorded the contribution of Morris & Co products to the

development of what we would now term consumerism:

Appealing at first only to a limited circle of friends mostly engaged in the arts, the new

designs were eagerly seized upon. Morris and

Company had to extend their operations, and soon no home with any claim to decorative charm was felt to be complete without its vine and fig- tree so to speak - from Queen Square.16

As part of the same development Sir Coutts

Lindsay opened the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 to offer an alternative to the Royal Academy; Burne-

Jones was to become one of its most prominent artists. As Georgiana Burne- Jones later wrote, 'From that day [of the opening] he belonged to the world in a sense that he had never done before, for his existence became widely known and his name famous'.17 The business of Morris & Co increased

strongly in these years, as Charles Harvey and Jon Press have shown,18 and the range of clients extended to include Walter Bagehot, Edward

Baring and Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, for whom

Philip Webb built Rounton Grange in Yorkshire in 1876.19In 1877 too Morris & Co opened their shop in Oxford Street. Perhaps more significant in relation to the wider public was the adoption of Morris & Co

furnishings in many of the houses in the new and fashionable Bedford Park estate as it developed in the late 1870s. Moncure Conway in his Travels in South Kensington in 1 882 wrote, half-seriously,

as a matter of fact, a majority of the residents have used the wall-papers and designs of Morris, the draught on whose decorative works has become so serious that a branch of the

Bloomsbury establishment will probably become

necessary in the vicinity of Bedford Park.20

This meant that in 1881 Morris was confident and bold enough to take larger premises at Merton

Abbey by the Thames, and to extend further his

range of products, especially into woven tapestries.21 His conversion to Socialism in 1882 did not

apparently deter his customers, nor what Harvey and Press call 'his lofty attitude and forthright opinions'.22 For, by the 1880s, the Aesthetic Movement had become less a matter of an elevated Paterian taste for high art, and more a matter of consumer goods that might show their purchasers to be people of taste. In this form it was to be caricatured in Punch in the years after 1877, but both the principal caricaturists, George du Maurier and Linley Sambourne, were themselves clients of Morris & Co. Du Maurier introduced his affected aesthetes the Cimabue Browns in 1879, although they last only until 1881 (Fig. 5). In 1881 there also

appeared Gilbert and Sullivan's highly successful Patience y or Bunthornes Bride. An Aesthetic Opera, directed principally at Wilde but satirising an

entertaining range of male and female aesthetes. The contrast with Morris's development at the

time is striking. In 1882 he published his first major prose work, a selection of the lectures he had been

giving on social and cultural matters, Hopes and Fears for Art. By now he was moving inexorably into radical politics: he joined the Democratic Federation in early 1883, and became a member of its executive under the leadership of H M Hyndman, the earliest

English Marxist. Marx died in this year, and Morris tackled Capital in a French translation.23 As a

Socialist, he began travelling round the country lecturing for what was by now the declaredly Marxist Social Democratic Federation. In November 1883 he gave a remarkable lecture in the hall of University College, Oxford, on 'Art under

82




FIG.5 George Du Mauriers last drawing in the Cimabue Brown series for Punch: 'Frustrated Social Ambition : Collapse of Postlethwaite, Maudle and Mrs Cimabue Brown , 1881 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Plutocracy', in the course of which he announced himself to be 'one of the people called Socialists' and called on his audience to help him in the task of

changing society. 24

Morris wrote for, and helped finance, the SDF's newspaper Justice, but at the end of 1884, finding Hyndman an unyieldingly authoritarian

leader, he withdrew from the SDF, with a number of colleagues including Eleanor Marx, to form the Socialist League. By now an active political journalist, he established and edited the Socialist

League newspaper, Commonweal . In it he

published regular short and pithy articles on relevant issues, as well as his'socialist poem, Pilgrims of Hope (1885-6) and his

historical/political story A Dream of John Ball

(1886-7). On 13 November 1887 he was present at the demonstration in Trafalgar Square that was broken up by the authorities with a brutality that caused it to become known as 'Bloody Sunday'. The experience was important to him, and made him realise that the changes he desired in society would not come easily or quickly. He published a selection of his Socialist lectures in 1888 as Signs of Change , and in 1890, although he was deprived of the editorship of Commonweal by the Anarchist

group that was taking over the Socialist League, he was able to publish in it his Utopian Romance News from Nowhere, which came out in book form in 1891 and was to become his best-known work. In the present context it is notable that the future

society which Morris describes is one in which we see no evidence of High Art, although all the

objects of everyday use are well made, often richly ornamented, and used with pleasure by everyone.

83




Simultaneously in the 1880s, the Aesthetic Movement was gaining momentum, and two

flamboyant figures helped to increase its public prominence. By 1882 Oscar Wilde (Fig. 6), still under the age of thirty, was already well-known

enough to feature in Walter Hamilton s pioneering book The Aesthetic Movement in England alongside his elders Ruskin, Rossetti and Morris. By this time

Morris had met Wilde. Writing to Jane on 31 March 1881 Morris attempted a judicious judgment: 'did the babes tell you how I met Oscar Wilde at the Richmonds? I must admit that as the devil is painted blacker than he is, so it fares with O W Not but what he is an ass: but he is certainly clever too'.25 For his part, Wilde was always happy to pay tribute to Morris's aesthetic influence, as in the lectures he gave in America in 1882. In 'The

English Renaissance in Art', for example, Morris is described - with characteristic extravagance - as 'a master of all exquisite design and of all spiritual vision'.26 Nevertheless, when it came to decorating his own house in Tite Street in 1884, Wilde avoided Morris wallpapers; 'they seem to me often deficient in real beauty of colour. . . he is far more successful with those designs which are meant for textures that hang in folds'.27 Wilde preferred a

quieter style of decoration, more in keeping with our preferences today. Wilde's only known letter to Morris was in March or April 1891, and conveys Wilde's thanks on receiving a copy of one of Morris's books, probably The Roots of the Mountains ; its hyperbolic style - 'How proud indeed so beautiful a gift makes me. I weep over the cover, which is not really lovely enough, nor

nearly rich enough in material, for such prose as

you write'28 - could hardly be further from Morris's plain-speaking. The other self-

dramatising aesthete was the American painter James Abbot McNeill Whistler, who had come to

public notice in 1878 when he had instituted a libel action against Ruskin, who had said of his painting 'Nocturne in Black and Gold' that it was 'flinging a pot of paint in the public's face'.29 Although Whistler won the case, he was awarded only a

farthing in damages and was financially ruined. But his flamboyant performance in arguing his case in court made him well known. Thus in

F IG. 6 Oscar Wilde, by Carlo 'Ape' Pellegrini, published in Vanity Fair 24 May 1884 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

84




February 1885, Whistler was able to deliver his Ten O'Clocl { Lecture to a fashionable audience in St.

James's. In it he argued that art was an elevated human practice, and that only a minority of Masters was capable of creating it.

30

A year and a half later, Morris gave a lecture called 'Of the Origins of Ornamental Art' which,

Eugene LeMire has argued,31 constituted a direct answer to Whistler; in it, as we would expect, Morris expressed a democratic view of the origins and function of art. 32 Morris remained consistent in his critique of aestheticism. Thus in 1888, in 'The Revival of Handicraft', he wrote:

It is to my mind that very consciousness of the

production of beauty for beauty's sake which we want to avoid: it is just what is apt to produce affectation and effeminacy amongst the artists and their following.33

'In the great times of art', he argued, it had been created not for the sake of beauty, but 'for the

glory of the City, the triumph of the Church, the exaltation of the citizens, the quickening of the devotion of the faithful' or 'the instruction of men alive and to live hereafter'.34 Art must, that is to say, have a social function.

By contrast, in the following year, 1889, Walter Pater published a volume of essays called

Appreciations, in which he reissued his 1868 essay on Morris's poetry, without the Conclusion he had used in The Renaissance, with the title 'Aesthetic

Poetry', following it with an essay on the poetry of D G Rossetti. And, in 1891, Wilde brought together four of his witty and iconoclastic essays on art and society as Intentions ; the most effective of these essays, 'The Decay of Lying', was first

published in the Nineteenth Century in January 1889; it attacks realism in contemporary fiction and expresses a preference for artistic invention, or what Wilde terms 'lies'.35 The Morris of the 1890s retained his allegiance to Ruskin and to

Socialism, and produced Socialism . Its Growth and Outcome in collaboration with E Belfort Bax in

1893, but he also developed two new creative

activities, the reform of book production through the Kelmscott Press and the writing of the series of Late Romances. In rapid succession, the Press issued The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), the edition of Ruskin's The Nature of Gothic (1892)

quoted earlier, The Wood Beyond the World (1894), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1895) and The Well at the World's End (1896, the year of Morris's

death). It was these romances which, in the view of Norman Kelvin, to be considered below, made Morris attractive to the 'autonomous' writers of the period. Certainly they were greatly admired

by the young Yeats: 'the only books that I was ever to read slowly that I might not come too

quickly to the end', as he called them in Four Years in 1921. 36 However, when Lionel Johnson reviewed News from Nowhere , he made no

particularly 'aesthetic' claims for it.37T F Plowman contributed an article on 'The Aesthetes' to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1895 in which he necessarily included a consideration of

Morris, but it was his decorative work rather than his writings that was emphasised:

By his work in this direction his name has become familiarized in thousands of households that his 'Earthly Paradise' had failed to penetrate. He it was who gave practical expression to the new-born desire of the modern householder to have his domestic surroundings more artistically fit and harmonious than they had hitherto been.38

Whether or not Morris would have welcomed such a verdict, it was one widely shared at the time. Whatever his distaste for the Movement, his name was consistently invoked in relation to aestheticism. This no doubt helps to account for the tart quality of his references to it.

The last part of this article will consider some recent work that has a bearing on the topic discussed. In 1996, in his thoughtful Introduction to the fourth volume of The Letters of William

Morris, covering the period from 1893 to 1896, Norman Kelvin commented on Morris's reputation in the 1890s:

»5




While 'art for arts sake' was an abhorrent concept to him intellectually and morally, as a performance his production of literature, and his willingness to be praised, made it possible for others to

appropriate him for a literary movement in many ways alien to him, and if not to assimilate him into the Aesthetic Movement, to see his work as

sympathetic or harmonious with it.39

Kelvin also mentions that, in the art world, 'Morris continued to have appeal to many of those in whom he could - or would - take no interest

(Lucien Pissarro is an example), as well as a growing appeal for the art world in general.'40 In this connection he instances the inclusion of work from Morris & Co and the Kelmscott Press in the exhibitions in Brussels in 1894 and 1895 arranged by Octave Maus under the title Le Libre Esthétique ; other exhibitors were Gauguin, the Pissarros, Signac, Sisley, Redon, Renoir and even - in 1895 - Aubrey Beardsley. Morris wrote to Holman Hunt in January 1895, at Maus s suggestion, to draw his attention to the exhibition, commenting that 'there is a growing interest, and quite an intelligent one, being taken in France and Belgium in the English schools of art, both decorative and more strictly pictorial.'41 However, Kelvin does not suggest that there was any substantial change in Morris's own position.

In the same year, Linda Dowling's The

Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic

Democracy offered a thoughtful and challenging account of the relation of the Ruskin tradition to aestheticism. In her view, 'at the heart of the vision of aesthetic democracy inspiring Ruskin and

Morris, one still evident in Wilde's musings on mankind and utopia, lies an idea of aristocratic

sensibility unrecognised as such'.42 She sees Morris as directly attacking Oxford culture and aestheticism in his November 1883 lecture in Oxford on 'Art under Plutocracy': Morris was

protesting against 'the apparent betrayal of art and

beauty into the hands of a self-nominated and

supercilious elite'.43 Dowling further discusses Morris in the chapter 'The Brotherly Company of

Art', in which she suggests that 'brotherly companies' were of the greatest importance to

Morris, from Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co onward to the Hammersmith Socialist Society, but that none of these proved fully satisfactory, so that he was left at the end turning to 'political quietism'44 and pleasuring his eye with expensive manuscripts and the books of the Kelmscott Press. Unable to solve the problem of his dual allegiance to democracy and to high artistic standards, he created in News from Nowhere 'a world of aesthetic

democracy as a realm of unending sensuous beauty that seemingly lacks only art as such'.45 In Nowhere there are excellent craftworks, but the 'fine arts have been curiously displaced'.46 Morris could

present 'a vision of aesthetic democracy only at the cost of art as such'.47 Wittily but reductively, Dowling concludes that Morris sacrificed 'intellectual culture' to 'the hay-making and boat rides of Nowhere'.48 Thus, in Downing's view, it was left to Pater and Wilde to 'reinstall' art at the centre of the democratising project. Dowling's is one of the most important studies of the relevant issues published in recent years, but she seems to me not to take seriously enough Morris's commitment to creativity outside high art, and the

question of how creative the ordinary human being can actually be. In addition, she is certainly exaggerating in speaking of the 'political quietism' of Morris's last years: it was as late as June 1894 that he published the energetic and optimistic 'How I became a Socialist' in Justice, and Eugene LeMire has shown that the outstanding lecture 'Communism' was delivered in 1893, and that Morris gave a funeral oration for Sergius Stepniak at Waterloo Station in December 1895 and a lecture on 'One Socialist Party' in January 1896.49

Nevertheless, Dowling had suggested a perspective which brought out clearly the tensions within Morris's position.

Feminist accounts of the culture of the period offered another perspective. Talia Schaffer and

Kathy Alexis Psomiades edited Women and British Aestheticism in 1999. They followed Hamilton's 1882

86




work in considering 'a central feature of aestheticism' to be 'its status as both a high-art and a mass-cultural movement',50 and emphasised that

many women contributed to it, even after the Wilde trial of 1895. Morris gets most attention in the

typically thoughtful contribution by Regenia Gagnier, 'Productive Bodies, Pleasured bodies: On Victorian Aesthetics'. Gagnier develops her

argument from the acknowledgement that recent American scholarship has paid more attention than British to 'markets, commodification, and

consumption'.51 She repudiates the argument of some 'male leftists' that 'a feminine desire to consume and imitate the decadent leisure class' had been responsible for the process that led to 'universal commodification and massification',52 stating convincingly her belief that both desire - associated with consumption - and labour - associated with

production - are equally valid. In a section of her article on 'The Productive Body' she remarks that Ruskin's 'political economy of art', which focused on 'the producer of the work and the conditions of

production', was a view shared by Morris and Marx, and 'generations of marxists'.53 It is helpful to be reminded that the values of Ruskin and Morris in

England should be linked with the wider tradition of which Marx is the centre. Because she is so well aware of the opposite pole to production, that of

consumption, Gagnier concludes the section by raising a number of important questions. First she asks how Morris & Co products may be compared with those of the much less well-known Mary Eliza

Haweis, whose work had been discussed earlier in the volume by Alison Victoria Matthews. Gagnier notes that Haweis shared with Morris an interest in 'book production, typesetting, fashion, and furniture

design' as well as the Middle Ages, and that both

produced 'commodities suburbanites could use to furnish their homes'. This leads her to the question: 'Is it the quality of Morris's work, his status as a

socialist, or his gender as a craftsman that

distinguishes him from Haweis as a home decorator, or does his socialist theory but make his unintentional participation in a high-end niche

market all the more ironic?'54 While Mrs. Haweis seems too lightweight a figure to constitute a real

challenge to Morris here, the irony attributed here to the situation Morris found himself in was one that he could see no easy way to resolve. He is to be seen

wrestling with the problem in his long letter to Emma Lazarus of 21 April 1884 about Merton

Abbey and profit-sharing, which concludes,

strikingly, 'I am driven towards revolution as the

only hope...'55 Women in British Aestheticism was followed in

2000 by Schaffer's The Forgotten Female Aesthetes:

Literary Culture in Late -Victorian England .

Although her main concern is with literary texts, Schaffer does comment on design issues. But her treatment of Morris in this context is highly questionable. In particular she argues that Morris and his follower Walter Crane failed seriously to consider 'the popularity of women's decorative arts in their own period'; instead focusing on 'the

everyday crafts of exotic men' such as fourteenth-

century peasants, Kurdish shepherds and Indian

ryots.56 While Morris was certainly concerned about the destruction of the crafts traditionally practised by men, there is no evidence for the statement about his attitude to women as craftworkers.

Harvey and Press have shown that he encouraged Jane, her sister Bessie, and her friends to undertake

craftwork, and that the products of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. and later Morris & Co were often aimed at women who wanted to work on the materials provided.

57 Morris's letters to Catherine Holiday in the 1870s show that she was not only, in MacCarthy's words, Morris's favourite

embroiderer, but 'in effect his creative partner.' In this context, MacCarthy had presented Morris as 'at the centre of the burgeoning Art Needlework movement'. She went on:

It is possible to view this as a retrograde movement, a means of keeping women captive with their needles, and indeed some of the larger- scale Morris and Burne-Jones embroideries...

kept the ladies of the household occupied for

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many years. But Morris was concerned with the

releasing of creative instincts which would otherwise be dormant. In his determination to break the grip of mechanically worked canvas

embroidery, introducing freer designs, more varied colours, he was indeed the prophet of the subversive stitch.58

It is also the case that 1879 or 1880 Mrs.

Wardle, whose interest in needlework Morris

encouraged, founded the successful Leek School of

Embroidery, which at its peak 'involved thirty or

forty local women, some amateur ladies, some paid professionals',59 while May took charge of the

embroidery side of the work of the Morris & Co in 1882 at the early age of twenty three. In addition, Kate Faulkner was one of the finest craftworkers at the company, as her work as a tile-painter and

particularly as a gesso-artist clearly indicates. Schaffer's feminist argument ignores some

important facts. In her admirable desire to draw attention to

the forgotten female aesthetes of her title, Schaffer is oddly negative about Morris. In her third

chapter she discusses the emergence of 'the artistic

professional'60 and argues that it was the 'male aesthetes who turned the home' - previously a woman's concern - 'into an extension of the market economy and the museum, the male- identified public sphere with which they were

already familiar. The reign of the homemade craft

gradually gave way to the new regime of

financially valuable collectibles'.61 Male writers -

she names Charles Eastlake and H J Jennings -

'ordered women to get rid of their "junk" and to

replace it with properly tasteful objects whose artistic worth was guaranteed by a trained

expert'.62 But she complicates the picture by arguing that women writers like Rhoda and Agnes Garrett in their Suggestions for House Decoration , 1877, and Mary Eliza Haweis in h a- Beautiful Houses y 1882, were influential through their advice manuals: they contributed fundamentally to the

antiquarian ethos of the 1870s and 1880s'.63

Schaffer particularly admires the slightly later Rosamund Marriott Watson, whose The Art of the House y 1897, starts by 'rejecting its own masculinist intellectual tradition', including that of aestheticism.64 But a striking feature of the chapter is that it provides no account at all of the work of

Morris, which the reader would expect to feature here. Even more surprisingly, there is no comment about the matter in the main text. However, if the reader goes to Note 20 on p.259 he or she will be informed that 'I do not discuss the designs of William Morris and his followers . . . because they were too expensive to be part of ordinary consumers' home decorations.'65 This is so far removed from previous historians' accounts -

many of which have been quoted earlier in this article - that one looks for any justification. The source quoted is John Gloag's introduction to a 1969 edition of Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste : 'The individual work of the artist-craftsman whom Morris had inspired was superbly made and

fabulously expensive. They produced 'collector's

pieces' for a small number of wealthy patrons, and their work had no effect on the furnishing of the Victorian home.'66 But Gloag was far too good a historian to have dismissed the influence of Morris in the way suggested. It is clear that he was

referring not to Morris - caricatured as early as 1865 by Rossetti as 'The Bard and Petty Tradesman', (Fig. 7) because of his marketing of his work - but to some of his followers in the Arts & Crafts Movement who produced the kind of works described here for specific wealthy clients; but none of them had a shop in Oxford Street. It is

surprising that a scholar of Schaffer s quality should have made such an error of interpretation, which has the effect of denying the importance of Morris products for the Victorian middle class, attested to by so much other scholarship.

Ruth Livesey's Socialism, Sex and the Culture

of Aestheticism in Britain , 1880-1914, 2007, provided a well-balanced account of the issues suggested by her title. In her introduction, she asserts

convincingly that,

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despite Morris's own early association with

aestheticism, his later socialist aesthetic theory of the 1880s was in many ways a reaction against this final flowering of the movement into the

figure of the individuated, anti-naturalist aesthete. Morris and other socialist writers

attempted to resist the effeminate ethic of

consumption associated with the aesthetes and

reintegrate the material and corporeal into a

productive aesthetic ideal. 67

Livesey's first chapter gives a thorough account of Morris's aesthetics and their relation to the ideal of 'manly labour', remarking in passing that 'Morris has long proven troublesome to those

seeking to place him in the history of the aesthetic movement and the rise of modernism', suggesting that Nikolaus Pevsner had to split him into two

halves, one progressive, one reactionary, in order to do so.68 Notwithstanding the importance to Morris of 'manly labour', Livesey shows in her second

chapter that a number of women like Clementina Black and Olive Schreiner responded positively to

his ideas; his 'masculinization of the artist . . . should not be seen as an exclusionary tactic that

prohibited the possibility of women drawing upon it for their own ends'.69 For Morris the manliness that found expression in useful work was the antithesis not of femininity but of slavery.

The last work to be considered here is Aesthetic Circles : Design & Decoration in the Aesthetic Movement , 2010. In it, Charlotte Gere provides a

wide-ranging account of 'the influence of artists' houses and households' on house decoration more

generally.70 She shows that this influence encouraged eclecticism, with elements including the Chinese, Japanese and Persian, but that 'William Morris was the Aesthetic decorator of choice; his legacy is

probably the most long-lived at any time before or

FIG. 7 'The Bard and the Petty Tradesman by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1868. Even his close friends were aware of Morris's two seemingly conflicting sides . Illustrated in a letter from Rossetti to Jane Morris and included in an album of drawings and caricatures © Trustees of the British Museum.

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since'.71 But she points out that, unlike other

prominent artists who liked to parade their achievements and their homes, Burne-Jones and Morris created for themselves what she terms 'a

socially evasive lifestyle'.72 Gere considers a number of books giving advice to the middle classes on domestic decoration, including Charles Eastlakes Hints on Household Taste (1868), Mrs Haweiss The Art of Beauty and Clarence Cook's The House

Beautiful (both of which appeared in 1878) and R W Edis's The Decoration and Furnishing of Town Houses

(1881), in which Edis shows his own rooms, decorated with Morris's 'Fruit'.73 More generally, Gere remarks, 'Morris had shown that it was

possible to retail the artistic look, and the new

department stores made it fatally easy'. 74 The adverb

'fatally' implies a more negative view of

consumption than seems to me to have been taken elsewhere in the book; but the issue, whichever way we respond to it, is a central one for the development of our commodity culture since Morris's day. Gere draws particular attention to the involvement of middle-class women in 'the new decorating scene',

arguing that they became increasingly important 'both as arbiters of taste (and authors of the above- mentioned decorating manuals) and as practitioners of interior design in either a professional or amateur

capacity'.75 Her fourth chapter on 'The Houses and Their Owners' includes a section on Morris at Red House and subsequendy at Kelmscott Manor and Kelmscott House, which ends with a generous but not extravagant assessment of his influence:

He transformed the way in which people of modest means decorated their houses, by making art available not through an elaborate process of

commissioning, but from a shop. Although the full-blown Morris & Co. treatment was not affordable by any but the very wealthy, Morris's influence was pervasive, especially among cultivated professionals. The most popular of his

wallpapers, 'Daisy', covered the walls of many of the little red-brick 'Queen Anne'-style houses that sprang up in garden suburbs on the fringes of London.76

Indeed; but this was not the revolutionary transformation of the whole of society that Morris had become inspired by socialism to hope for. It was not the lives of 'cultivated professionals' but of all his fellow-citizens that the socialist Morris wished to improve. His inability to achieve this set him

inexorably and painfully apart from the Aesthetic Movement that he had helped to bring about.

NOTES 1 . William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure , Jonathan

Cape, 1945; 1975, p.64. 2. May Morris, editor, The Collected Worlds of William

Morris, Longman, Green & Co, 24 volumes, 1910- 15, vol XXII, 39 Afterwards cited as CW

3. R V Johnson, Aestheticism, Methuen and Co, 1969, p.59.

4. See Peter Faulkner, 'Morris and Swinburne', Journal of William Morris Studies , vol. XV, no 3 (Winter 2003), 4-26; 4.

5. Walter Pater, 'Poems by William Morris', Westminster Review, vol 90, October 1868, 300-12; in Peter Faulkner, editor, William Morris: The Critical Heritage , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973, pp.79-92; p.89. Afterwards cited as CH.

6. Walter Pater, The Renaissance . Studies in Art and Poetry, Macmillan and Co, 1893, p.247.

7. Pater, 'Poems by William Morris' in CH, p.89. 8 . Ibid. p.92. 9. 'Thomas Maidand', 'The Fleshly School of Poetry',

Contemporary Review, 18, October 1871, 337. 10. W J Courthope, 'The Latest Developments in

Literary Poetry', Quarterly Review 132, January 1872, 75-81.

11. TEarle ^NtVay^A Study of Swinburne, 1926; Methuen 1969, p.93.

12. John Morley, review of The Renaissance, Fortnightly Review , 86, April 1873, 476.

13. Clive Wilmer, ed, William Morris . News from Nowhere and Other Writings, Penguin, 1993, p.367. Afterwards cited as Wilmer.

14. Wilmer, p.254. 15. Charles Harvey and Jon Press, William Morris .

Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain, Manchester UP, 1991, p.77. Afterwards cited as Harvey and Press.

16. Walter Crane, 'The English Revival of Decorative Art' in William Morris to Whistler, G Bell and Sons, 1911; Norwood Editions 1976, p.54.

1 7. Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Macmillan and Co, 1904; Lund Humphreys, 1993, II, 75.

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18. Harvey and Press, p.l 19. 19. It was to Bell that Morris addressed his well-

known remark about being forced to minister to 'the swinish luxury of the rich' - a result of what Harvey and Press (p 86) call the unresolved tension 'between the firm and the market'.

20. Moncure Conway, Travels in South Kensington, 1882, quoted in Charlotte Gere, Aesthetic Circles: Design & Decoration in the Aesthetic Movement, V&A Publishing, 2010, p. 100.

21. Harvey and Press, p. 165. 22. Ibid. p. 180. 23. Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris . A Life for Our

Times, Faber and Faber, 1994, p.467. Afterwards cited as MacCarthy.

24. CW, XXIII, 73. Tony Pinkney has given a vivid account of the lecture in his William Morris in Oxford, illuminati, 2007, Ch. 3.

25. Norman Kelvin, editor, The Collected Letters of William Morris, Princeton: Princeton UP, 4 vols. 1984-1996, II, 38. Afterwards cited as Kelvin.

26. Wilde, 'The English Renaissance in Arť, Robert Ross, editor, The First Collected Edition of the "

Worlds of Oscar Wilde9 1908; Dawsons, 1969, vol X, 25.

27. R Hart-Davis, editor, The Letters of Oscar Wilde, Hart-Davis, 1962, p.174.

28. M Holland and R Hart-Davis, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, Fourth Estate, 2000, p.476.

29. Stanley Weintraub, Whistler. A Biography, Collins, 1974, 190; Weintraubs following chapter (pp 194-216) gives a detailed account of the trial.

30. J McN Whisder, Ten 0'Cloc' Lecture, Chatto and Windus, 1888.

31. Eugene LeMire, 'Morris' reply to Whistler,' Journal of the William Morris Society, vol I, no 3, Summer 1963, 3-10.

32. Eugene LeMire, editor, The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris, UP, 1969, pp.136-157. Afterwards cited as LeMire.

33. CW, XXII, 337. 34. Ibid. 337. 35. Morris suggested in a letter to Norton in June 1889

that the book that he was writing at the time, The Roots of the Mountains, might fit well with Wilde's definition: 'I will rather carry out Oscar Wilde's theory of the beauty of lying, as it will have neither time, place, history, or theory in it.' See Kelvin, III, 77. But it would be inappropriate to attach too much importance to this light-hearted remark.

36. W B Yeats, Autobiographies, Macmillan, 1955, p.141.

37. Lionel Johnson, review of News from Nowhere; in CH, pp. 339-53.

38. T F Plowman, 'The Aesthetes', Pall Mall Gazette, V, January 1890,37.

39. Kelvin, IV, xxxiv. 40. Ibid. IV, xxxiii. 41. Ibid. IV, 246. 42. Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art. The

Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy, 1996, p.xii. 43. Ibid. p.75. 44. Ibid. p.67. 45. Ibid. p.69. 46. Ibid. p.70. 47. Ibid. p.73. 48. Ibid. p.72. 49. LeMire, pp.287, 290, 290. 50. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades,

editors, Women and British Aestheticism , 1999, p. 3. 51. Ibid, p.270. 52. Ibid, p.271. 53. Ibid, p.278. 54. Ibid, p.280. 55. Kelvin, II, 275-7. 56. Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes.

Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England , p.75. Afterwards cited as Schaffen

57. Harvey and Press, p. 176. 58. MacCarthy, p.360. 59. Ibid. p. 360. 60. Schaffer, p.73. 61. Ibid. p.78. 62. Ibid. p.79. 63. Ibid. p.87. Schaffer describes Mary Haweis as 'a

kind of female William Morris, a self-taught master of illumination, bookbinding, typography monograms and drawing. She illustrated and designed all her own books, including the complicated archaic typeface for Beautiful Houses .' (p 108) The evaluation implied here is surely extravagant.

64. Ibid. p.87. 65. Ibid, p.259. 66. Quoted in ibid., p.259. 67. Ruth Livesey, Socialism, Sex and the Culture of

Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914, OUP, 2007, p.13. 68. Ibid. p.34. 69. Ibid. p.52. 70. Charlotte Gere, Aesthetic Circles : Design &

Decoration in the Aesthetic Movement, V&A Publishing, 2010, p.9.

71. Ibid, pp.17-18. 72. Ibid.p.28. 73. Ibid.p.88. 74. Ibid. p.65. 75. Ibid. p.91. 76. Ibid. p. 172.

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