MORRIS MAJOR

THE 19th century was the great age of the universal men, multi talented individualists who worked in many fields at once, stamped themselves magisterially on all they did, and resisted categorising. William Morris (1834-96), later Eminent Victorian and Gothicist - a major exhibition of whose work opened this week at the Victoria and Albert Museum - was most certainly one of these. He was a poet, romantic novelist, designer, printer, calligrapher, weaver, dyer, stained glass artist, painter, socialist prophet and political agitator, as well as an inspirer and crusader for many causes (he was, among other things, a pioneer conservationist, and an active and effective one, particularly of old or historic buildings).

As is well known, G.B. Shaw in his early, Fabian years was a committed follower of Morris and W.B. Yeats in his youth was another disciple who felt the pull of Morris's strong personality and the impact of his ideas, lectures and conversation. The example of the Kelmscott Press which he founded can also be seen in the Cuala Press, run in Dublin by Yeats's two sisters.

Morris had ties with Ireland and was sympathetic towards Home Rule; unlike so many outside commentators (Carlyle, for example) he did not write off the Irish as ignorant and irrational, a race born to make trouble for their betters. After a stay in Dublin in 1886, during which he delivered speeches to the Socialist League, he remarked: "On whatever point the Irishry are wild, they are quite cool, sensible and determined on the Home Rule question."

Where does Morris stand today? In an age of mass production and increasing automation, his emphasis on handcraft probably seems anachronistic ("elitist") to many or most people; in the ultra materialistic world of the late 20th century, dominated by a kind of managerial, neo capitalist ethos, his cult of guild socialism and the humanising of labour is hopelessly out of step; and in the neon lit brashness of the pop culture, his neo medievalism and autumnal Romanticism have become utterly alien to contemporary taste.

Morris believed passionately in the democratisation of culture and in art for the many rather than the few; yet he produced artefacts which sold mainly to the privileged or monied classes and which, as he sadly admitted, the working man could never afford. (The working man would probably have disliked them, in any case).

Being out of step with the age would not have worried him greatly, since he opposed most of the dominant trends of his own time, and all his life Morris was a fighter for minority causes. Yet he certainly was not a fringe, isolated figure trying to shore up sandcastles against the flood tide of modernity and mass commercialism; his practical influence on the arts and crafts movement was vast, and thousands of cultured families in Britain today still cherish their Morris wallpapers or, hangings or furniture. He had a lasting effect on standards of craftsmanship and finish he helped to fight the triviality and vulgarisation of public taste which followed directly on the Industrial Revolution and his insistence on bringing major artists, such as Burne Jones, directly into the area of design, helped to raise both the level and prestige of design per se. And finally, his insistence that working class men and women should be treated as something better than wage slaves was absorbed into the bloodstream of the mid 20th century European welfare states.

Morris was a practical man as well as a visionary and utopian, his workshops were well organised and he showed himself shrewd and competent in dealing with financial matters and in marketing his products. His nature and life were full of contradictions he was both a hearty and an aesthete, a bon viveur and a puritan, looking back yearningly to the Middle Ages and forward to the millennium of Marx.

He was a professed atheist who hated monarchy and referred to Queen Victoria as "the Widow Guelph," yet he helped to decorate royal palaces and was in constant demand to supply churches with stained glass and furnishings. He was himself a self taught expert on old, English, ecclesiastical architecture and carvings, at least two generations before John Betjeman and others turned this into a fashionable cult; and his firm, Morris and Co, lost much of its income from stained glass commissions after Morris had courageously published a manifesto refusing any further dealings with those who were "restoring" old churches.

Coming from a prosperous middle class family which had set itself up as county gentry, Morris was intended to be a clergyman but opted instead, after studying at Oxford, to take up architecture. However, his apprenticeship to G.E. Street, creator of the Law Courts in London, lasted less than a year and under the influence and insidious charm of D.G. Rossetti's magnetic personality he decided to become a painter. Along with his friend Edward Burne Jones, Morris was rapidly swept up in the currents of Pre Raphaelitism as well as the Gothic Revival preached by Ruskin and practised by Pugin; but while Burne Jones stuck to painting and fulfilled his genius in that field, he himself soon saw that his true vocation - apart from poetry, that is - was for design. So from 1861 he was the main inspiration behind the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co, "fine art workmen in painting, carving, furniture and the metals". Burne Jones, Rossetti and two other Pre Raphaelite painters, Ford Mad ox Brown and Arthur Hughes, were members, and so was the architect Philip Webb.

After years of dedicated hard work and of coping with all the headaches of costings, supply of materials, marketing strategies, and training of staff, Morris began to feel resent fully that his friends were not pulling their weight in the firm, although they continued to take money out of it. So he reorganised it completely and after a prolonged, sometimes bitter struggle, threw out most of his original partners, including Brown and Rossetti who never forgave him. They did not go to court, however, and finally Morris more or less bought them off with £1,000 each.

Burne Jones, by contrast, remained a close friend and continued to supply him with stained glass and tapestry designs, as Morris moved increasingly into weaving and dyeing and the production of fabrics. Here, too, his perfectionism and love of proper materials led him to reject the new aniline dyes, refined from coal and tar, which were hugely popular in the 19th century and have turned out to be, for the most part, disastrously impermanent. Morris mastered the technical secrets of the trade and produced his own "natural" dyes, even helping his workmen out in the actual dyeing process, so that sometimes he absently turned up at public functions and dinner parties with his hands still coloured blue or green up to the wrists. He also, in the face of some ridicule and hostility, revived old weaving techniques and traditions, mainly French.

MORRIS'S greatest showpieces were his own houses, where the decor, furniture and living style were all in a unity and all very much his own. Philip Webb designed his first home, the famous Red House in Kent, but the best remembered of them is, Kelmscott Manor, a homely, rambling, warm coloured Tudor building on the upper reaches of the Thames (not to be confused with Kelmscott House, his London base in Hammersmith). Originally Morris and Rossetti leased it together, since Rossetti had become the quasi official lover of Morris's statuesque, silent wife Janey, but Rossetti was not a man to live for long in the country and went back to his famous bohemian nest on Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. In the end, Janey broke off the liaison, mainly for the sake of her two daughters, after Morris had endured much mental suffering from which he tried to escape by a long visit to Iceland.

The exact nature of Morris's marriage has supplied biographers with whole chapters of surmise, along with relatively few facts. From the start Janey never claimed to love her husband, though plainly she respected him and deferred to him in most matters. They had two children inside a few years, then they seem to have given up marital relations altogether while preserving the decencies of mutual domesticity and responsible parenting of their daughters. Plainly the union was a failure sexually, which may explain Janey's bouts of nervous illness and certain agonised passages in Morris's poetry; and probably golden tongued, womaniser, succeeded where her husband failed. Later, when in her forties, Janey was for a time the mistress of Wilfred Scawen Blunt, poet, aristocrat, radical, famous horseman, and an even more accomplished society stud.

Morris had intimate, intense friendships with other women but these seem to have remained platonic. He came to rely increasingly for emotional comfort on his daughters, though one of the great blows of his life was the epilepsy which wrecked the life of his elder daughter, Jenny. The second one, May, became his mainstay and chief helper, following him ably into both the arts and crafts field and socialism (when her own marriage broke down, she was for a time the mistress of Shaw).

Morris's socialism was the product of his anguished broodings about the evils of contemporary society and the debasement of labour, bolstered theoretically by his readings of Marx. He only learned late in life to speak in public and even then he was ill at ease on a platform, but he forced himself conscientiously to go through a grindingly demanding - and often very tedious - round of political meetings, protests, committee work, debates, lectures, manifestoes and letters to the newspapers.

His left wing activities made him many enemies and cost him some old friends but above all they must have helped to shorten the life of a man so irascible and highly strung, and already facing so many and varied demands on his energies. He was not really suited to the role of public man, and he had few of the qualities, good and bad, which make an effective politician. Morris was in certain ways a typical public school Englishman, who found it difficult to communicate with the blower orders, either man to man or from a lecture platform. Yet his personal integrity and total, unsparing commitment to almost I everything he did won him respect, and Morris ranks today as one of the founding fathers of British socialism.

As a poet, just now he is remembered only by a few anthology pieces and even these have become faded, while his long narrative poems and prose tales are mostly out of print and hopelessly out of favour. Morris had a certain ultra male, heroic (though not militarist) ethos which might irritate or antagonise readers today; he was fascinated by the old Norse sagas and by Scandinavia in general. In his lifetime he ranked as a major figure in Victorian poetry and was seriously in contention for the Poet Laureateship after Tennyson's death - though Morris himself favoured his old friend Swinburne, whose reputation for atheism and immorality ruled him out with most of conservative opinion. Instead of either being chosen, the post went in the end to a poetically safe nonentity, Alfred Austin, whose verse is of embarrassing, sometimes comical badness.

In fact, Morris was a born poet who grew rather to despise poetry because it came to him too easily, and his many other vocations - or avocations - often pushed it into a secondary place. The epics and other long works will probably go on gathering dust in second hand bookshops and university libraries, together with the long poems of Browning, Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, Sir Edwin Arnold, Alfred Doughty, etc. Probably he did nothing better than his early lyrics in the 1858 Defence of Guenevere, though it was an unwieldy epic poem, The Earthly Paradise, which made him famous (and he was much better known in his lifetime as a poet than as a designer).

The recent biography by Fiona McCarthy treats him very seriously in this capacity, so a major reconsideration of his verse is probably overdue - but then, so many of Morris's achievements are still either undervalued or known only to scholars, specialists and connoisseurs with a taste for the complex, sometimes esoteric culture of the late 19th century. In a specialist age, he is paying the price for his stupendous versatility, for being a jack of all trades and a master of many.