John Bruce Glasier

“ We could not have wished for a more desirable advertisement of our Socialist principles. Hitherto Socialism had been associated in the press mainly with troublesome free-speech and unemployed disturbances, and a few nugatory election candidatures in London. We had now the gratification of seeing Socialism flamed in the public eye as the tutelary divinity of the Muses, the true spiritual progenitor of genius and all the wondrous achievements of art and literature which adorn the ascent of humanity. ”

“ No one who really believes in God as an All-benevolent, Almighty Father, and who bears in mind Morris' inherently childlike way of looking at all things from a human level, will be disposed to see anything irreverent in this outburst. His whole conception of life as consisting in fellowship, in doing things to make oneself and one's fellows happy, his hatred of cruelty and oppression, selfishness, sordidness and ugliness in every form, was, if not religion itself, at least that without which religion becomes an illogical and unfeeling pietism or pretence. ”

“ He taught us as no one ever before the lesson that art was the greatest expression of joy in work and life, and the highest evidence (as I will put it) of man's likeness to, and his worship of, his Creator. In the intensity of this conviction, no less than in the splendour of his example, concerning the high importance of art as a fundamental test of man's real freedom, of democracy, and of civilisation itself, Morris stands out unique among the greatest teachers of the modern world.
Lastly, and inevitably, Morris was a Socialist. ”

“ As I hear the yells and shrieks and all the degradation cast on the glorious tongue of Shakespeare and Milton, and I see the brutal, reckless faces and figures go past me, it rouses in me recklessness and brutality also, and fierce wrath takes possession of me, till I remember, as I hope I mostly do, that it was my good luck only of being born respectable and rich that has put me on this side of the window amid delightful books and lovely works of art, and not on the other side in the empty street, the drink-steeped liquor shops, and the foul and degraded lodgings. ”

“ But I tell you frankly that I should not, even if I could, work at the kind of work and in the kind of way of working, that you do—not even though offered a thousand pounds a week for so doing, instead of the paltry one or two pounds a week which you are asked to be content with, and which I regret to think you so frequently are content with. Sooner than work in an ironworks or coal mine as you folks do for ten or twelve hours a day, every week day, year out and year in, all my life, I should rebel rather, and take whatever consequences my rebellion might bring upon me. ”

“ We do not know what we ourselves are, or what the world is, nor, if it comes to that, do we know what poetry, or art, or happiness is. One thing is quite certain to me, and that is that our beliefs, whatever they be, whether concerning God, or nature, or art, or happiness, are in the end only of account in so far as they affect the right doings of our lives, so far, in fact, as they make ourselves and our fellows happy. And in actual fact I find about the same amount of goodness and badness, happiness and misery among peoples of all creeds—Jew, Christian, and Gentile. ”

“ Heaven, or another life beyond the grave, of which men dream and hope so fondly, could give me nothing which I possess the faculties to use or enjoy, that the present world and life cannot give, except maybe—were it true—reunion with those who have gone before or who will shortly afterwards follow. Human wrong-doing and perhaps disease can be got rid of: but old age and death are irremediable. Sometimes death appears to me awful, terrible, so cruel, so absurd. ”

“ When deep in poetry reading in my earlier manhood days, his name was familiar to me as the author of 'The Earthly Paradise' and 'Jason,' though as yet the only work of his that I had read—the only one I could find in any public library in Glasgow at that time—was 'Love is Enough, or The Freeing of Pharamond.' I knew also that, besides being a poet of acknowledged high rank, he was famed in art circles as a designer and reformer of the decorative arts, but I had seen none of his designs, and had little idea of what was the nature of his craftsmanship. ”

“ Craig was now over ninety years of age, and though frail in body was extraordinarily alert in mind, and full of enthusiasm for the new Socialist movement. His queer little cramped-up figure as he sat on the platform with a grey Scottish shepherd's plaid round his shoulders, contrasted drolly with the burly form of Morris, who, despite several warning turns of illness, still looked in the height of health and energy. ”

“ Morris had the disability, if it be such, of being incapable of assuming any character or views other than his own. He could never have been an actor; he had no histrionic talent. In his speech, his writings, his art, in all things that he did, he was always William Morris. There never perhaps was an artist or writer whose work was invariably so unmistakably his own. From but a sentence or two of any writing of his, or the smallest scrap of one of his designs, his authorship can be discovered at once. ”

“ Nowhere did Anarchism spring up spontaneously, so to speak, in the country, as Socialism so often did. It grew and spread only within the Socialist Movement, parasitically in the branches—a fact which accords with general experience of Anarchist propaganda in other countries.
Men are often what is described as 'born Socialists'—born, that is to say, with altruistic natures, abhorrent of all social wrong, and with minds easily attracted by Utopian ideas. Men are also often enough 'born individualists'—wholly obsessed, that is to say, with their own self-interests and desires. ”

“ The Gods are all as real to my imagination as are historical and living persons, and their miraculous powers seem quite natural to their office, so to speak. Some people, as you know, have upbraided Burne-Jones and myself for using so much Christian legend and symbolism in our work, all of which they say is quite outside the belief of any but most crudely superstitious minds; but the fools do not perceive that with us in our art Christian legends and symbolism are as true as with any of themselves—as true and as eternal as the world itself in which we live. ”

“ The great object of Socialism was to place all men and women on a footing of equality and brotherhood in order that they might one and all have the utmost possible freedom to live the fullest and happiest lives. ”

“ So far from regarding work in that light, so far from looking upon work as being in itself an evil, an undesirable or penitential task, Morris held work to be the highest, the most God-like of all human capacities. Without work life would cease to have any meaning or yield any noble happiness at all. ”

“ As we listened, our minds seemed to gain a new sense of sight, or new way of seeing and understanding why we lived in the world, and how important to our own selves was the well-being of our fellows. His ideas seemed to spring from a pure well of idealism within himself, and in his diction the English language had a new tune to the ear. No such an address had ever been heard in Glasgow before; no such single-minded and noble appeal to man's inherent sense of rightness and fellowship towards man. ”

“ But, mark you again, what I aim at is Socialism or Communism, not Anarchism. Anarchism and Communism, notwithstanding our friend Kropotkin, are incompatible in principle. Anarchism means, as I understand it, the doing away with, and doing without, laws and rules of all kinds, and in each person being allowed to do just as he pleases. I don't want people to do just as they please; I want them to consider and act for the good of their fellowsfor the commonweal in fact. ”

“ But I don't think a Socialist community will require many governmental laws; though each citizen will require to conform as far as possible to the general understanding of how we are to live and work harmoniously together. But, frankly and flatly, I reckon customs, if they are bad customs, to be always more oppressive and difficult to get rid of than political laws. If you violate political laws you have the policeman and the soldiers, maybe, against you, but when you violate social customs you have the whole of the community against you. ”

“ It is now quite forgotten, I suppose, in the Socialist movement itself, but at the time it was a great windfall to us, 'the feeble band and few,' who were striving by means of our hoarse shoutings at forlorn street corners, and our lecturings in shabby out-of the-way halls, to rouse our million-fold fellow citizens from centuries of ignorance and prejudice, and persuade them that in our 'fantastic and impossible schemes' lay the only hope and means of the social redemption of mankind. ”

“ But I am not attracted, as some good men both in present and bygone times have been, with the idea of going out into the wilderness, either as an anchorite or as one of a group of Socialist Fifth Monarchy men. I don't want to get out from among my fellow men, for with all their faults—which are not theirs only but our own—I like them and want to live and work among them. ”

“ And that, as I shall explain later on if you will listen to me, is just the sum and substance of what Socialism means, which we have come here to preach to you this afternoon. And I call you "fellow workers" because, though I am, as you have just heard, a writer of poetry and such like, and what is called an artist or designer, I nevertheless do a great deal of work with my hands, hard work too, sometimes, not only for the pleasure of doing it, but actually, as you folk do here, as a means of livelihood. ”

“ Sharing, as I myself now do, very largely in this changed outlook of mind, I find the question forces itself upon me as it doubtless also does on many readers of these pages—Is the gospel of Art and Socialism as exemplified in the work and teaching of William Morris adequate as a practical precept and philosophy of life? Would I, for example, say to any earnest-minded young man or woman, 'Go and follow as far as in your power lies the teaching of William Morris, and therein you will find the whole duty and Kingdom of Man?' No, indeed, I should not. ”

“ A few months later he wrote her: 'I am sure it is right, whatever the apparent consequences may be, to stir up the lower class (damn the word) to demand a higher standard of life for themselves, not merely for the sake of themselves and the material comfort it will bring, but for the good of the whole world and the regeneration of the conscience of man; and this stirring up is part of the necessary education which must in good truth go before the reconstruction of society. ”

“ I am not, however, so much surprised to find down here in Scotland that you working chaps apparently found each your own way to Socialism without even being in contact, as we in London were, with foreign revolutionary influences, as that you have all come the same road, so to speak, and that road has simply been the road of the reading and political experience common to the more thoughtful of the Scotch working class generally. ”

“ I have never known what I fear many of you unfortunately have known, actual poverty—the pain of to-day's hunger and cold, and the fear of to-morrow's, or the dread of a master's voice, or the hopeless despair of unemployment. I have, I truly believe, lived as happy a life as anyone could wish to live, save for the misery of seeing so much cruel wrong and needless suffering around me. ”

“ Looking around the room, all so charming in the natural simplicity of its furniture—only useful and beautiful things were there, masterpieces of literature and priceless old volumes, Dürer engravings and rare pieces of craftsmanship, and all so kindly lit up in the tranquil candle-light with its ambient shadows—one was conscious of that companionableness in all about one that one feels in a deep forest glade. ”

“ And I felt, and now feel more than ever, that the one Socialism is true, universally and for ever, while the other Socialism is at least only half-Socialism, and makes only temporary and conditional appeal, and that not to the higher social but to the more groundling and selfish instincts of the race.
This feeling that Morris and Hyndman represented two widely different conceptions of Socialism was impressed upon me in a curious way by an experience that befell Morris himself on the night of his first Glasgow lecture which I have already described. ”