William Morris, His Life, Work and Friends Philip Henderson (Thames

and Hudson 63s)

Arts and artist

AUBERON WAUGH

William Morris, His Life, Work and Friends Philip Henderson (Thames and Hudson 63s) Rarely is a reviewer given any book which is such a delight to hold and to possess, produced with both extravagance and taste, that he hesi- tates before reading the actual text. Mr Hender- son's biography has Morris's 'Snakehead' chintz design for its dustjacket and binding, his 'Marigold' wallpaper for its endpapers. The eight colour plates alone could keep anyone happily absorbed for hours on end, and, although in the black-and-white illustrations I could have done with fewer pictures of Morris and more of his work, one must accept por- traits of the subject as a tiresome convention of biographies, along with the letterpress.

If one had been justified in one's hesitations about Mr Henderson's text, this would only, after all, be in the tradition set by Morris him- self. Two Kelmscott books illustrated here— The Story of the Glittering Plain and Love is Enough—are both masterpieces of the typo- grapher's and book illustrator's arts. Morris's title-page for the Glittering Plain is surely one of the finest things ever to come off a printing machine; but the actual words are abysmal, by any standards: 'It has been told that there was once a young man of free kindred and whose name was Hall- blithe: he was fair, strong and not untried in battle; he was of the House of the Raven of old time. This man loved an exceeding fair damsel called the Hostage . .

Now read on. Will he lay her at the end of Chapter One, or must we wait longer? To put readers out of their suspense, I will reveal that Haliblithe and Hostage only make it on the last page, by which time they are planning to have a family, and no doubt saving up for the deposit on a nice detached stronghold some- where. But the sad truth remains that the book has no merit whatever outside its magnificent decorated capitals and Walter Crane woodcuts. If Panther were to produce it at three and six- pence, in ordinary type, it would probably sell no more than half a dozen copies, even with a picture of the Hostage in the nude on tike front. The products of Morris's intellect sel- dom match up to those of his eye and nimble fingers.

To a great extent, as Mr Henderson writes in his preface, Morris's life was his work; and Dr Paul Thompson has already produced a most adequate survey of his work, which I strongly recommend to anyone interested. Mr Henderson's justification for producing 388 pages on his life, in the face of an impressive existing bibliography, is to correct the impres- sion of a mediaeval dreamer, remote from the political and sociological issues of his time. The reviewer must confess that if this false im- pression ever gained currency, it somehow escaped him. But there is a very good reason for producing a new biography every genera- tion or so—that aspects of a person's life which might have interested people at one moment in history are no longer quite so absorbing in the next, while other aspects, more likely to fascinate the modern reader, were largely left untouched.

For instance, it is interesting to learn that the Morris fortune derived from 272 shares in a Devon copper mine held by his father. These shares, the famous Devon Great Consols, were originally valued at £1 each and were changing hands around the time of William Morris's birth at £800, giving Morris pere a profit of rather over £200,000. Those were the days! In the year William was born, six Dorsetshire farm labourers were sent to Botany Bay for forming a union, and children were hard at work alongside their parents in the mines underneath Devon's unspoiled bucolic acres. One wonders what happened to all that copper. Probably it went into terrible brass door-knockers and circular teatrays of Indian design, many of which are with us yet, lest we forget.

For it was as much the defective aesthetic tastes of his time, when the progress of the industrial revolution was beginning to create a lower-middle-class market for fancy goods of tawdry design and shoddy workmanship, as it was the prevalent social injustices which drove Morris to his idiosyncratic position, equating socialism with traditional craftsmanship and excellence of design. History has shown that the two aspirations are incompatible. Nobody would shudder more than he at what has re- sulted in the arts from the shift of wealth inside society: the total estrangement of `higher' art from popular interest or concern, leaving it the province of a small, self-perpetuat- ing body of experts; the mediocrity of most `popular' art; the sad, pseudo-functional furni- ture in every modern home, drawing its inspiration from the modern equivalent of his own beloved Scandinavian folklore. Whatever influence Morris may have had on the socialist movement in his own time, I do not think that a meeting today between himself and Miss Jennie Lee in the Ministry of Culture would give him much confidence that his political life had been usefully spent.

It is fascinating to speculate on what Morris would do if, exhumed from the churchyard at Kelmscott and reanimated by some revolting technological process, he had to make a choice between his political beliefs and his art. Mr Henderson's book suggests the answer, when he reveals Morris's reasons for not surrendering the profits of his business and living on a weekly wage of £4 in order to join the proletariat. Morris was keenly appreciative, especially in his later years, of his own creature comforts. His income from the business was £1,800 a year (the equivalent, perhaps, of

f9,000—tax-free---today). If he had shared £1,600 among his one hundred workers, retain- ing only £4 a week (the equivalent of £20) he

would have had to give up one of his houses, dismiss two of the servants at Hammersmith,

deny himself the wine he loved and the ex- pensive tobacco from Fribourg and Treyer in the Haymarket. He chose to keep the money

—partly for health reasons and partly because,

although he admitted it would be very nice for his workers, 'it would not alter the position of any one of them, but leave them still mem- bers of the working class, with all the dis- advantages of their position.'

We can all recognise that line of argument. If William Morris were alive today, he would probably have joined the brain drain, or be living in the South of France as a tax fugitive.

Without the insight of Mr Henderson's ex- cellent and well-researched book, I would never have guessed it.