William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement/11
CHAPTER XI
AS GUEST AND COMPANION
IT was a joyous, though at times a somewhat exciting, experience, to accompany Morris on a sight-seeing expedition, especially when amidst unfamiliar surroundings. One had a sense of pleasant unrest, a feeling of expectancy that some interesting adventure was on hand, that something unwonted would occur. One forgot oneself listening to his talk and observing his movements, and one's attention was kept constantly on the alert.
But always his companionship was delightful, and the hours spent with him left an unfading fragrance in the mind.
I am now about to tell of a Sunday I had with him in Glasgow when, as he announced to me, he was going to have 'a day off,' except for his evening lecture and a couple of hours at his 'Odyssey,' and that I might do with him as I pleased. During his earlier visits he was usually the guest of some friend, such as Professor John Nichol, Dr. Dyer (then prominent in the Scottish Co-operative Movement), or R.F. Muirhead, M.A., one of the members of our League. But he preferred to stay at an hotel, where he could be more at liberty to give his spare time to writing and where he could more freely invite workmen comrades to have a chat with him. On this occasion he had arranged to put up at the Central Station Hotel, but had agreed to be my guest at my mother's house during the day.
I met him on his arrival by the night mail train from London about seven o'clock in the morning, and after leaving his bag at the hotel and slinging his familiar 'haversack' over his arm, we set forth together for breakfast at my mother's house on the south side of the river. Although the morning was bright and warm in the spring sunshine, hardly a soul was visible in the streets; and as we walked round by George Square in order that Morris might despatch a telegram at the Central Post Office, we seemed to be almost the only inhabitants of the city. Morris had on former visits been shown the leading thoroughfares and sights of Glasgow, including the Square which is reckoned the architectural cynosure of the city. His opinion of my native town, which Robert Buchanan with a fine stretch of imagination described in his Exhibition Ode as 'the dark, sea-born city with its throne on a surge-vexed shore,' was not a complimentary one. He had only seen Glasgow under various aspects of wet and dismal weather. This morning, however, the Square, bathed as it was in spring sunshine, with its flower-beds in freshest bloom, and clear of the hubbub of the trams and other week-day traffic, had an air of modest capitoline splendour that seemed to gainsay bravely the sweeping dispraise of its detractors.
Morris glanced at the Palladian edifice of the City Chambers, still looking assertively new, that fronted the Square. The vehemence and rudeness of his expression on first seeing this building a couple of years before had astonished those who were with him, and he again turned his face from it with an unquotable epithet of contempt. Looking round the Square at the Post Office, the Merchants' House, and the far-stretching range of elaborate facades of banks and other commercial offices in St. Vincent Place, his face hardened. 'Renaissance and the devil be damned!' was his comment; and addressing me he added 'Allow me, my friend, to remark, being as this is the Sabbath day, that your respected city, like most of its commercial kind, is, architecturally speaking, woefully bad, and I fear impenitently so. Your young "Scots wha hae" of the Glasgow School don't appear to have laid their reforming hand on your city architecture. Ruskin thirty years ago, in a lecture on architecture, called Glasgow the "Devil's Drawing Room." He would hardly feel obliged to amend his judgment of it to-day, if this is the best that Glasgow can show.'
I told him, however, that a little farther westward, where many new insurance, shipping, and other commercial premises were now being built, there were signs of better things. In several instances bold innovations based on the old Celtic style had been introduced by the younger architects.
'I'm glad to hear it,' he said, 'though I doubt me much—if you don't mind my saying so—about the applicability of your old Celtic style to the amenities of joint-stock money-grabbing.'
The statutes dotted round the Square amused him. 'It seems to me,' he said, 'that the idea has been to give the place the aspect of a cemetery—you Scottish folk being, as one of your own writers has said, much addicted to graveyard reflections. Is it not your own Laird of Logan who avers that Scotchmen are never really happy save when they are at funerals?'[1]
Looking up at the Scott monument, a tall column surmounted with an effigy of the great novelist, in the middle of the Square, he observed, 'But at any rate your Walter Scott is a worthier wight to thrust up in the Almighty's face than our London Trafalgar Bay hero.' Of Robert Burns' statue he remarked, 'They've tried, don't you think, to make your ploughman poet look something of a fine gentleman, with his pigtail, his ribboned breeches, and silver-buckled shoes? But I suppose a certain degree of class-respectability, in dress at least, is obligatory for admission into your post-mortem court of celebrities.' After going round the Square, he remarked, 'You have statues to Scott, Burns, and Campbell, but none to Dunbar or David Lindsay. Nor is there, Craibe Angus tells me, any memorial in Glasgow to William Motherwell, though he was a Glasgow man, and one of your best poets, besides being among the first Britishers to perceive the greatness of old Scandinavian literature. You have the illustrious heroes Victoria and Albert, but not Wallace or Bruce. Curious, isn't it?'
As we were crossing the river he stood for a moment looking at the huge unsightly girder-bridge of the railway spanning the river and completely blocking from view the western course of the water-way. I thought he was about to explode against the monstrous eyesore, but he turned away from it with a weary gesture. 'I wonder,' he said, speaking rather to himself than to me, 'if the time will ever come—and God! surely it must come—when to do a thing like that will be reckoned as devilish as poisoning wells or burning down churches and museums of Art. We speak of ourselves as a civilised people and yet are capable of ghoulish vandalism like that.'
Our house in Crown Street was one of the tenement flats universal in Glasgow, except in the West End and suburban neighbourhoods. Morris had already some notion of the Glasgow tenement system, but was curious about some of the arrangements of the dwellings that were unfamiliar to his English eyes. Ours, though one of the more spacious and improved dwellings of its class, was, like all other tenement houses in Glasgow, provided with nothing in the shape of a garden except the customary 'back-court' or 'green' used for drying clothes, and common to all the tenants. Speaking of the absence of garden plots anywhere in Glasgow, he said he did not know whether to be more surprised that the Glasgow people were not all revolutionists, or that any of them had enough imagination left in them to be Socialists at all.
'I wonder,' he mused, 'what sort of chap I should have been, Glasier, had I been brought up a fellow townsman of yours? Bannockburn does not appear to have done much for your city's elbow room, whatever it may have done for the "Liberty's in every blow!" that you sing about.'
At breakfast he enquired of my mother about the arrangements among the tenants for the using of the 'green,' and seemed pleased to hear that usually little or no misunderstanding arose over the allocation of space and respective washing days. 'I have always found it so,' he said, 'respecting the use of common property when there is reasonable equality of need and where self-interest is disciplined by established custom. I don't suppose there ever was much bother in the olden days among the village folk respecting the use of common land or any of the old parish possessions, so long as the people were mostly neighbours and pretty nearly on the same social level; and even nowadays in the English villages the people get on in a much more friendly way over their public property rights than over their private property concerns.'
My mother was becoming accustomed to entertaining Socialist agitators whom her son invited home with him, often without forewarning her of his intention; but like so many Scottish, and especially Highland hostesses, she was somewhat shy of new guests, particularly when they were persons of public fame or visitors from other countries. Though she did not at that period know much about Socialism, except that, like Irish Land Leaguism and Atheism, it was regarded as a highly disreputable and dangerous doctrine, she respected and welcomed whomsoever her son brought to her door.
Such diverse personalities as Andreas Scheu, Leo Melliet, Lawrence Gronlund, the Rev. Dr. Glasse, Prince Kropotkin, Stepniak, Henry George, and Edward Carpenter had thus sat at her board, and each had presented a fresh problem of hospitality to her, so concerned was she that they should be 'welcome' in every sense of the word. But with Morris, as with the others, she was soon wholly at ease. His unaffected courtesy and simplicity of manners won her confidence at once, and it was a joy to me to see him and my mother so completely at home with each other. She had wondered what to make ready for breakfast, but I had assured her that he was not 'faddy' about his food, and that she need have no misgivings about his enjoying the customary fare of her table. So she had made him a fine ashetful of our own favourite Sunday-morning dish, to wit, ham, eggs, sausage, and haddock, with home-baked scones and oat-cake. He enjoyed the menu greatly, and said so (I should hardly have forgiven him if he hadn't!), and, his appetite being keen after the long train journey and the morning walk, he ate quite heartily, which rejoiced her heart. He chatted freely, but not obtrusively, keeping his conversation upon topics likely to be of common interest round the table. Learning that my mother knew Gaelic, he asked her about the West Highland pronunciation of certain words that had a common Gaelic and Latin root, and he told my sisters about some of the curious domestic customs in Iceland which he had observed during his visit to that country a dozen or so years previously.
After breakfast I sat with him in the front room, he meanwhile drawing from his 'haversack' an Odyssey and a Greek lexicon preparatory to his daily task of translation. He had much delight in the Odyssey, because it afforded so many glimpses into the everyday life and feeling of the Ionic people; many of the incidents and customs in the poem were remarkably akin to those described in the Norse Sagas.
I left him in the room by himself at his Odyssey, while I went over to Glasgow Green to take part in our usual Sunday morning open-air meeting of the League. He offered to accompany me, but I knew he was pressed to get on with his Odyssey translation, and assured him that our comrades would feel that he had done his duty amply by them if, in addition to giving his evening lecture, he turned up at our afternoon meeting and said a few words.
On my return I found him chatting with James Mayor and Archibald MacLaren, assistant professor of Greek in the Glasgow University—and, I think, R.F. Muirhead, M.A., all three members of our branch, whom I had invited to join us at midday dinner. In the conversation at table Morris asked about the attitude of the Glasgow professors towards Socialism. He was told that only Edward Caird, of the Moral Philosophy chair, showed any sympathy with Socialist ideas or indeed with democratic politics of any kind. Professor John Nichol of the Literature chair, who had formerly been a strong Radical and friend of Mazzini, was now an embittered Unionist, while Lord Kelvin and the Science and Medical men were almost without exception Tory and reactionary.
'It is a rum state of affairs, don't you think?' said Morris. 'But it's the same all round. The intellectuals are on the wrong side on almost every question that affects the right understanding of life. They are the priesthood of the mumbo-jumboism of modern civilisation—Edward Carpenter is quite right about that. Were I had up for any sort of crime touching property or political freedom, I should prefer to take my chance with a jury of dukes and sporting squires, rather than one of professors and college dons.'
Reference was made to the fact that the Scottish Universities had, without exception, at recent parliamentary and Lord Rectorship elections, elected Unionist politicians who had no distinction whatever in science or literature.
'That just shows you,' said Morris, 'that your intellectuals, dull dogs as they mostly are, have some scent of what's in the wind, and that when it comes to the pinch they are more concerned about the preservation of their rotten class privileges than about the interests of literature and art. Matthew Arnold was right about the Philistines, being himself a good bit of that kidney. We'll have to mend or end what we call education, or it will play the devil with us. Fancy a Carlylean aristocracy of talent, the country under the benevolent rule of Senior Wranglers and LL.D's! Or fancy a democracy educated up, or rather down, to the level of Oxford and Cambridge, as some even of our Socialist friends would have it!'
He was reminded that John Ruskin had a year or two previously contested the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University as a Tory Unionist, but had been badly defeated. 'But he called himself also the "reddest of red Communists,"' Morris observed, 'and he deserved to be defeated for his pranks. But I don't suppose he was defeated because he called himself a red-hot Communist, or even because he held heterodox views about Capital and Labour. Your University folk knew and cared precious little about his views on these questions, or if they did, I fancy they took those views more seriously than did the stock-jobbers. He was defeated, I suspect, simply because he represented to the generality of the intellectuals what they particularly affect to esteem—namely Literature and Art—but which they really don't. Literature and Art are rebellious jades. They preferred an uninformed political reactionary because, as I have said, they sniff revolutionary trouble ahead, and they want to set up as stiff a political guard as they can for the protection of their class privileges.'
The conversation turned for a bit on his translation of the Odyssey, and he discussed with MacLaren certain points in Greek idiom and grammar. Something was said about a recent attack on Morris by W.E. Henley in one of the magazines, but Morris dismissed the topic with a contemptuous rap at 'Grub Street garbage.'
After lunch I proposed to Morris that we should start an hour or so earlier than need be for the afternoon meeting, so as to have time for a look at the Cathedral. This he agreed to, and our companions having to leave us for engagements of their own, he and I set forth together. I took him up the old Saltmarket Street (famous in 'Rob Roy'), where he halted every now and then to note some detail in the now old and shabby relics of the mansions where once Bailie Nicol Jarvie and the prosperous merchants of the city dwelt. These old buildings in the Scottish baronial style of architecture interested him greatly.
Turning along London Street (why we took this roundabout route, I now forget) we struck down a narrow passage known as 'Shipka Pass,' where, in the window of a quack doctor's herbal dispensary, were exhibited a 'Wax Venus' anatomical model and illustrated literature of the Palais Royal type. There had recently been a good deal of satirical comment in the London press over the refusal of the Glasgow Town Council to accept for the Art Gallery a picture with a nude figure, the ground of their refusal being that the picture was 'indecent.' The unexpected display, therefore, of pornographical wares in a public thoroughfare in the very heart of the city rather surprised Morris. I explained to him, however, that it was one thing for our 'unco guid City Fathers,' as they were sarcastically called by their London critics, to refuse to accept and exhibit a picture which they thought objectionable, and another thing for them to suppress by prosecution a shopkeeper for exhibiting and selling what he was pleased to describe as 'scientific works.'
I did not, however, gather from Morris that he was wholly on the side of the London press. 'There are,' he said, 'some painters who are rum enough coves, and some paintings that are only fit for monkey-houses.' Meanwhile a big gaunt labourer, who had been gaping wonder-struck at the Wax Venus, now kept close by us, eyeing Morris with stupid curiosity. I suggested to Morris that the fellow evidently regarded him as the 'Famous Professor and Specialist,' referred to in the herbalist's window. Much amused, Morris began telling me a story about a country bumpkin returning home drunk from a fair. While telling the story we emerged from the 'Pass' and were crossing the Gallowgate, a broad thoroughfare, just as he had reached the climax of the tale. In the zest of his recital he halted in the middle of the street, and oblivious to the astonishment of the passers-by and to my discomfiture, he dramatically imitated the drunken speech and gestures of the hero of the tale. Visibly scandalised at what they conceived to be the drunken jollity of a Highland farmer or skipper who had been visiting some neighbouring 'shebeen,' the passers-by cast reproachful glances at us both. One man, dressed in his 'Sunday best,' even made steps towards us with the intent, I could see, of reprimanding my companion for his unseemly state in a public thoroughfare on the Sabbath day; but a forbidding gleam in my eye deterred him. As we were in a neighbourhood where the Socialist League frequently held meetings, and where I was likely to be recognised as 'one of those Socialist agitators,' I was glad when we escaped public attention by turning up the nearest side street. Morris had not in the least noticed the spectacular interest which he had aroused, and of course I did not allude to it.
When we arrived at the Cathedral a number of people, members of the choir perhaps, were passing out. Morris lingered a few moments in the outlying graveyard, looking at the inscriptions on the tombstones, and then we made towards the porch of the southern aisle which was used for public admission.
We were within a few yards of the doorway when he stopped abruptly, as if struck by a rifle ball, his eyes fixed furiously on some object in front of him. As he glared he seemed to crouch like a lion for a leap at its prey, his whiskers bristling out. 'What the hell is that? Who the hell has done that?' he shouted, to the amaze, alarm, and indignation of the people near by.
I looked in the direction of his infuriated gaze, and saw at once what was the offending object. There it was; conspicuous enough—a sculptured memorial or sarcophagus in shining white marble jammed into the old grey stonework of the aisle, cutting through the string-courses of the base and projecting up into and completely cutting off a portion of the window above—in truth an atrocious piece of vandalism. 'What infernal idiot has done that?' Morris again demanded, and heedless of the consternation around him poured forth a torrent of invective against the unknown perpetrators of the crime. For a moment I thought he might actually spring upon the excrescence and tear out the hateful thing with his bare fists. Meanwhile the scandalised onlookers, believing they were witnessing the distraction of some unfortunate fellow creature bereft of his reason, resumed their way, remarking compassionately about him to one another.
The banging of the heavy studded doors of the porch by the sexton, closing the Cathedral until the evening service, arrested his invective. Anxious to divert his attention from the desecrating tablet, I remarked that we should not now gain admission into the interior of the Cathedral. 'Damn the interior of the Cathedral!' he shouted. 'I've seen enough of the depredations of your Cathedral blockheads. Catch me putting my nose into another mess of restoration botchery.'
Quitting the Cathedral ground, we turned towards the Necropolis, an eminence now converted into a public cemetery, which commands a wide view over the city.
Glancing up at the huge mound speckled with glittering white tombstones and monuments, he remarked on the circumstance that Christian communities had failed to make tolerable architectural features of their burial places, even when, as in Glasgow and so many other towns, the most prominent and attractive situation had been appropriated for burying grounds. In Italy, where they had the tradition of the catacombs and the pantheons, some attempt had been made to give architectural importance to burial places, particularly such as were preserves for the interment of rich and illustrious persons. But, generally speaking, he said, cemeteries were amongst the most incongruous and positively unsightly creations of civilised man. The only burial places that showed even decency of public taste were some of the old churchyards, where simple stone tablets or slabs had been made of the same kind of stone as the adjoining church, which became veiled in a kindly way by the grass or yew bushes. Yet it was surely possible to devise some sort of Houses of the Dead, which, while frankly declaring their purpose, were yet beautiful and impressive as an expression of religious and communal feeling. The older civilisations, as we know, attached great importance to their burial places, making imposing temples of them. But in this, as in so many other things, individual and family vanity and private property feeling had completely obstructed the development of what might have been one of the noblest expressions of communal feeling.
The John Knox obelisk monument, a large Doric column surmounted by a statue of the famous reformer, is the most prominent feature of the Necropolis. I expected Morris would poke fun at it, but he was only gently satirical. 'He does look as though he were the Lord of Sabaoth up there, don't he? Or shall we say, Shepherd of the Dead? But he was something of a hero—and that too despite the fact that Carlyle said so, my friend. He was, in his own way, a great reformer. He had a big idea of making the people upright and self-respecting and intelligent, concerning not only the affairs of the Church but the public weal—according to his lights. He was not such a narrow-minded zealot as were so many of your respected presbyters of later date. You see, Dr. Glasse of Edinburgh has been coaching me up on your kirk history. He read me parts of the "Book of Discipline," which I think most sensible stuff.'
I mentioned that the Jewish burying-ground, which was situated in the upper corner of the Necropolis, had inscribed on its gateway the lines from Byron's 'Hebrew Melodies,' beginning:
'Oh, weep for those that wept by Babel's stream,'—
one of the few tributes to the Jewish race in Christian literature.
Morris, however, showed no desire to see the inscription. He remarked, 'Byron's "Hebrew Melodies" were a bit "put on," don't you think? although there was something in the glamour of things Jewish that attracted him. But I'm not "begrudging" him his sympathy with the Jews. I'm no Jew-hater. As likely as not I belong to one of the lost ten tribes.'
'But where are we going? Why are we here?' he asked, suddenly halting, as we were walking along one of the cemetery paths.
'Indeed, I do not know,' I replied, and explained that on finding the Cathedral closed I had taken him for a walk round. But it was now time, I said, for us to be getting to the meeting on the Green.
He was much amused. 'And so you brought me to a cemetery by the way of pleasant recreation,' he said with a twinkle. 'I suspect it's in the blood, my boy, and that the saying about Scotchmen enjoying going to funerals is not a defamatory one. But after preaching you, as I did a few minutes ago, a discourse according to the example of my fellow-countryman, Sir Thomas Browne, on funeral urns, I had better not heave any more stones at your Scottish taste for tombstones.'
On the way back, notwithstanding his vexation at the Cathedral and his 'reflection among the tombs,' he was, as usual, brimful of pleasantry about the oddity of things he observed by the way.
Towards the foot of the High Street, the neighbourhood of which at that period was a congeries of slums, the throng of children became so dense that we had to thread our way as through a market crowd. Having almost no room to play in, the youngsters were inclined to be more noisy and mischievous in their pranks, and passengers displaying any peculiarity of appearance rarely escaped their larkish compliments. Morris and myself, with our shock hair, soft hats, and unconventional make-up, doubtless looked a somewhat outlandish pair, and presented a conspicuous mark for their jocosity; and we had to run the gauntlet of a more than usual fairing of their salutation and mimicry. 'Oh, my, look what's coming!' 'Hide yer!' 'Buffalo Bill!' 'Holy Moses!' 'Run and lock the park gates, Jamie!' and like exclamations heralded our way. Morris with his grand, elderly, seafaring mien, attracted the brunt of the waggery. One urchin fronted him with a respectful gesture. 'You'll find one just over the way, sir,' he said solicitously. 'Find what, my little man?' asked Morris unsuspectingly. 'A hairdresser, sir'—and a chime of laughter greeted the sally, while a little girl seated on the kerb with an infant in her arms piped out, 'Dinna mind them, mister, they're jist trying tae mak' a fool o' ye.' A troop of youngsters fell into line behind us, chanting improvised doggerel:—
'Sailor, sailor; sou'west!
Dance a jig in the crow's nest!'
Morris, who was accustomed to the guffaw of juvenile plebeians in the lower quarters of London, took this sportiveness wholly in good part, occasionally returning their banter con amore, much to the little larrikins' delight. He remarked on the exceeding cleverness, and often ingenious wit, displayed by children when in play together, especially in the poorer districts where they were freer from the tutelage of grown-ups, and had developed clan or community traditions of their own. 'But the faculty soon withers,' he added; 'the poor things become dull and vacant-minded once they grow out of childhood and lose the sap of the common stem. The natural well-springs of their imagination become soiled and run dry.'
Jail Square, as the wide pavement opening in front of Glasgow Green is called, is, or was, the most popular public forum in Scotland, and I suppose in Great Britain. Every week-night and all Sunday the Square is thronged by groups of men, mostly of the working class, listening eagerly to the debates on topics of religion and politics—in those days chiefly Catholicism versus Protestantism, Calvinism, Atheism, Spiritualism, Home Rule, Henry Georgeism, Republicanism, and Socialism. A portion of the space close to the railings of the park was by custom reserved for the speechifying of religious or political propaganda bodies, stools or chairs being used as platforms.
Morris was greatly taken with the scene. His heart seemed to warm at the sight of the crowded groups of disputants, as if it recalled to him something of the early folkmoot and market-place assemblies of which he always wrote so affectionately. But our time was nearly spent, and I took him towards the group against the railings where the League meeting was in full swing. Pete Curran, afterwards Labour M.P. for Jarrow, was speaking, and recognising Morris he cut short his speech announcing that the author of 'The Earthly Paradise' would now address the meeting—an announcement that at once caused the crowd to gather in.
Morris mounted the stool and spoke for about twenty minutes. He referred to the recent Free Speech troubles in London, and congratulated the working men of Glasgow on having preserved the right of Free Speech on so large a scale in the heart of the city. He explained in quite simple terms the aims of Socialism, avoiding the usual jargon phrases of the movement. Referring to what he had just seen of the way in which the children of the poor were pent up dismally in the slums, he contrasted the ugly and sordid conditions of the lives of the people generally with what might be and ought to be in a civilised and wealthy nation—his allusions alike to the rich and the poor being wholly untinged with cynicism or insult.
Several questions were put to him, one of which was: 'In one of the evening papers last night you are described as a rich man. Are you willing to submit to a general divide of riches?'
'I am not quite a rich man, as rich men go nowadays,' replied Morris; 'but I am richer than I ought to be compared with the mass of my fellows; or rather, perhaps, I shall say they are poorer than they ought to be. I am more than willing that my riches, such as they are, should be put into the common stock of the nation; and I shall rejoice to work for the community, and give it the benefit of whatever talent or skill I possess, for the same wages that I demand for, and that the nation could afford to pay, under a proper economic and moral system, to every workman—dustman, blacksmith, or bricklayer—in the land.' A big cheer greeted the reply.
The word having gone round that it was William Morris, the famous poet, who was addressing the Socialist crowd, the audience had grown to quite a large one; but I had now to hurry him off in order that he might have a cup of tea before the evening meeting. He was heartily cheered as he dismounted from the stool. A small contingent of people followed us a bit of the way, eager to have a better look at the distinguished and attractive 'Poet, Artist, and Socialist.'
The evening meeting was a great success. The Waterloo Hall was filled with about 800 people, the majority of whom had paid 6d. and 3d. for admission, and at the conclusion of the lecture a resolution in favour of Socialism was adopted almost unanimously.
As our custom was, we adjourned from the Hall after the meeting to the branch rooms, where Morris smoked and talked and sang with us for a goodly hour.
- ↑ I had sent him a copy of the Laird of Logan, an old book of Scottish anecdotes. But the saying is not there. It is a familiar tag among Scotsmen when affecting self-depreciation among Englishmen.