William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement/4
CHAPTER IV
GLASGOW IN THE DAWN
I had to leave the Edinburgh meeting immediately after Morris finished his lecture, as I had to return to Glasgow that night. Morris came on to Glasgow early on the Sunday, and was, I think, the guest of Professor John Nichol, of the Chair of Literature. I did not see him until the evening meeting in St. Andrews Hall. Despite the wretched weather, the hall, the largest in Glasgow, seating nearly 5000 people, had an audience of about 3000 for him. Perhaps in no other city in the kingdom could audiences of a higher level of intelligence be obtained than those which assembled on Sunday evenings in Glasgow at that period, under the auspices of the Sunday Society, to listen to lecturers of the variety and stamp of Professor Tyndall, Alfred Russel Wallace, Ford Madox Brown, W.M. Rossetti, Bret Harte, Henry George, and Professor John Stuart Blackie. For while the Sabbatarian ban, then still stringent in Scotland, against the holding of any but religious meetings on Sundays kept away the more timid of the intellectual elite, it ensured, on the other hand, that the audiences which attended the Sunday Society lectures were for the greater part composed of men and women whose minds had been aroused from orthodox sloth and were prepared to take unconventional paths. Morris himself remarked on the prevalence of eager, intelligent faces in the crowded seats near the platform. There were, of course, among his listeners a considerable number of university and art school students, artists, and literary people, but by far the greater number were artisans of the thoughtful and better-read type, who in those days formed, in Glasgow at any rate, a large proportion of the working class—a larger proportion, I regret to think, than is the case nowadays.
On his appearing on the platform Morris was scanned with the keenest interest. His unconventional dress, his striking head, and his frank, unaffected bearing at once favourably impressed the audience, which gave him, not perhaps quite an enthusiastic, but rather, as I thought, an exceedingly friendly and respectful reception. A pleasant hum of expectation passed through the hall as he purposefully laid his manuscript on the reading-stand, and planted the water-bottle close to his reach, and 'shook his wings out,' as one might say, before beginning to speak.
He read his lecture, or rather recited it, keeping his eye on the written pages, which he turned over without concealment. There being more room to swing about in than on the Edinburgh platform, he was freer in his movements, and every now and then walked to and fro, bearing his manuscript, schoolboy-like, in his hand. Occasionally he paused in his recital, and in a 'man to man' sort of way explained some special point, or turned to those near him on the platform for their assent to some particular statement. Of the lecture itself I only remember that it seemed to me something more than a lecture, a kind of parable or prediction, in which art and labour were held forth, not as mere circumstances or incidents of life, but as life or the act of living itself. 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.
It is not easy for thinkers of the present generation to understand how strange and wonderful in those days were the tidings of this discourse, alike to the few of us who were already on the Socialist path, and to the many who had hardly, if at all, ever considered the idea of the possibility of 'making the world anew.' Socialist principles generally, and Morris' own distinctive Socialist views, have now become more or less familiar to everyone; but how different it was in the days when Gladstonian Liberalism represented the utmost political hopes of civilisation! But not all the audience were in ready response. That the sympathies of the majority were, for the time being at least, fairly won by the lecture was testified alike by the eager interest with which they followed every word and by their frequent bursts of applause during its delivery. There were, however, a good sprinkling of dissentients, chiefly old Radicals, men with firmly-set lips and cogitative brows, who, while unable to withhold their applause from the democratic sentiments in the lecture, never for a moment lost sight of their inveterate individualist doctrines. These men shook their heads doubtfully from time to time as they realised how far beyond their accustomed political horizon the lecture would lead them. I remember observing with amusement when the meeting was over some of these old veterans lingering in their seats or standing in groups at the doorway of the hall, eagerly expostulating to one another concerning the danger or impossibility of the views which had been laid before them. One old Secularist whom I knew well remarked to me irritably, but with a wistful look in his deeply-recessed but wonderfully bright eyes, as he passed out by the platform door: 'Ah, young man, I heard a' that kind o' thing frae Robert Owen and Henry Hetherington fifty and more years ago. They were going to bring in the New Moral World, as they ca'd it, but they found human nature too hard a flint to flake. Na, na, it hasna' come in my day, and it'll no come in yours; and it'll no come at a' if you're going to wreck the Liberal Party as some o' your friends are trying their best to do.'[1]
Yet there were present at the lecture (as there were at nearly all our Socialist meetings) a few veteran Owenites who had not wholly lost the faith and hopes of their younger days. These aged Radicals, who were in most instances Freethinkers, listened enrapt to the unfolding afresh of the ideas of the Communist Commonwealth, and were pathetically eager to communicate their joy in beholding once more in the sunset of their years the glory of vision which had filled their eyes in the morning glow on the hill-tops long ago.
This was Morris' first lecture in Glasgow, but it was not the first pronouncement of Socialism before a large audience in Glasgow. Two months previously Mr. Hyndman had publicly inaugurated the new branch of the Social Democratic Federation by a lecture on Socialism to a crowded audience of 1200 people in the Albion Hall. This may be regarded as the first official statement in Glasgow of modern 'scientific' Socialism, though Social Democratic principles had been explained from the platform of the new branch in small halls for several months previously. Morris and Hyndman were then the two most prominent representatives of the Socialist movement in this country, and their lectures in Glasgow in the back-end of the year 1884 mark definitely the beginning of public Socialist propaganda in what has since proved the most active centre of Socialist agitation in the Kingdom.
But what a difference there was between the two lectures, and between the two lecturers! Hardly could a greater contrast be conceived. Indeed, alike in matter and in spirit, both the lectures and the lecturers might have seemed to belong to different worlds or civilisations. Hyndman, striking in appearance, with his long, flowing, senatorial beard, his keen, restless, searching eyes, and full, intellectual brow, dressed in the city best, frock-coat suit of the day, with full display of white linen—his whole manner alert, pushful, and, shall I say, domineering—looked the very embodiment of middle-class respectability and capitalist ideology; a man of the world, a Pall Mall politician from top to toe.
I cannot remember the arguments of his lecture; I can only recall the impression made by it on my mind at the time. Brilliant and convincing it undoubtedly was—dealing almost wholly with the economic and political malefactions of the capitalist system, and I enjoyed it greatly. Racy, argumentative, declamatory, and bristling with topical allusions and scathing raillery, it was a hustings masterpiece. But it was almost wholly critical and destructive. The affirmative and regenerative aims of Socialism hardly emerged in it. The reverberating note, in feeling if not in phrase, was 'I accuse, I expose, I denounce.' He seemed to look round the civilised world and see there nothing but fraud, hypocrisy, oppression, and infamy on the part of the politicians and money-mongers on the one hand, and on the other only wooden-headed ignorance, stupidity, and servility on the part of the working class.
Mankind appeared in his view compounded of oppressors and oppressed, fleecers and fleeced, dupers and duped. He was jauntily cynical, or affected to be so. 'I am an educated middle-class man. I derive my living from the robbery of the workers. I enjoy the spoil, because it is in itself good, and the workers are content, and apparently desirous that I should enjoy it. Why therefore should I object to their slaving for my enjoyment if they themselves don't?' Yet nevertheless there was in his protagonism a fiery and even fanatical zeal. He appealed for better things—for justice and democracy—for a new system of politics and economics, though he hardly indicated whence would come the motive or the power to effect the change, except in the material factors of civilisation—the inevitable next stage of social evolution.
I heard Hyndman's lecture, as I have said, with real enjoyment. It confounded and exasperated his fellow-respectables in the audience, and it stung and roused the working class. His argument against Capitalism was incontestable. In the field of economics his victory over the opponents of Socialism was, or seemed to be, complete. But the lecture, though it excited, did not inspire. One gained no increase of faith in man's humanity to man from it. There was hardly a ray of idealism in it. Capitalism was shown to be wasteful and wicked, but Socialism was not made to appear more practicable or desirable. There was, in fact, very little Socialism in the lecture at all—it was an anti-capitalist ejaculation.
When I contrasted Morris' lecture with Hyndman's, and compared the two men themselves—their impress on their hearers, their personal qualities—I felt then, as I have felt ever since, that the two lectures were different kinds of Socialism, even as the two men were at heart different types of Socialists. And I then felt, and still feel, that I liked the one Socialism and not the other. 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. It had been arranged, as mentioned in the previous chapter, that after his lecture Morris should come along to the meeting-place of our Glasgow branch of the Federation for a short chat with the members. As soon, therefore, as he had gone through the civility of greeting a number of literary and 'art' folk who had gathered in the reception-room, he came away with Mavor and myself across the city to Watson Street, off the Gallowgate, where upstairs in a low-ceilinged warehouse flat the branch meetings were held. He arrived just as the public meeting was over, and found a dozen or so members grouped round the platform awaiting Morris' coming, W.J. Nairne, the secretary, acting as chairman.
The trouble inside the London Executive of the Federation, of which I have spoken in a previous chapter, had already divided the Glasgow branch into two factions. Nairne was unschooled, but an exceedingly zealous propagandist, who with myself had been chiefly instrumental in forming the branch, and was a keen partisan on the Hyndman side, so much so that he greeted Morris quite frigidly on his arrival, only grudgingly offering him his hand. The members generally, however, gave Morris a hearty cheer. Nairne said that he supposed Comrade Morris would like to say a few words to the members, and with this rather discouraging invitation Morris briefly addressed the meeting.
He was glad, he said, to have the opportunity of meeting for the first time his comrades in Glasgow—the few who had banded themselves together to begin the tremendous task of bringing into being a Socialist Commonwealth in Great Britain, and he congratulated them on the signs he had observed in Glasgow and Edinburgh of public interest in the subject of Socialism. He then alluded in careful words to the friction in the London Executive on the question of political policy, and expressed the hope that the dispute would be got over and that they would all be able to work together in unity inside the Federation; but even should the regrettable happening come that the two sides resolved to separate, he hoped both would continue friendly towards one another, making common cause for the overthrow of the capitalist system.
Immediately Morris concluded his remarks Nairne proceeded to heckle him, much as he might have done an avowed opponent of Socialism. Though surprised at the hostile attitude of Nairne and the catechistic nature of his questions, Morris showed no resentment, but answered the questions quite good-naturedly, and it was evident that the meeting felt drawn towards him, though the greater number of those present were, as I knew, ranged with Nairne on the Hyndman side.
On his rising to go, Nairne, as a sort of parting shot, put to him the question: 'Does Comrade Morris accept Marx's theory of value?' Morris' reply was emphatic, and has passed into the movement as one of the best remembered of his sayings: 'I am asked if I believe in Marx's theory of value. To speak quite frankly, I do not know what Marx's theory of value is, and I'm damned if I want to know.' Then he added: 'Truth to say, my friends, I have tried to understand Marx's theory, but political economy is not in my line, and much of it appears to me to be dreary rubbish. But I am, I hope, a Socialist none the less. It is enough political economy for me to know that the idle class is rich and the working class is poor, and that the rich are rich because they rob the poor. That I know because I see it with my eyes. I need read no books to convince me of it. And it does not matter a rap, it seems to me, whether the robbery is accomplished by what is termed surplus value, or by means of serfage or open brigandage. The whole system is monstrous and intolerable, and what we Socialists have got to do is to work together for its complete overthrow, and for the establishment in its stead of a system of co-operation where there shall be no masters or slaves, but where everyone will live and work jollily together as neighbours and comrades for the equal good of all. That, in a nutshell, is my political economy and my social democracy.'
Bidding the group good-bye with an encouraging word about the stir the Free Speech agitation was creating in London, Morris left the meeting, in company with Mavor, and next morning returned to London. Though he could not fail to observe Nairne's inquisitorial behaviour, he was not in the least offended at it, and remarked good-humouredly going downstairs: 'Our friend Nairne was putting me through the catechism a bit, after your Scottish Kirk-Session fashion, don't you think? He is, I fancy, one of those comrades who are suspicious of us poetry chaps, and I don't blame him. He is in dead earnest, and will keep things going, I should say.'
And Morris was right. Nairne was in dead earnest, and kept the Federation going in Glasgow, often almost single-handed, till his death twenty years later. By occupation he was a day-labourer (a stone breaker), with a wife and five children to support, and though industrious and a teetotaler his life was a hard and colourless one, and poetry and art were trivialities to him. He was class-conscious to the last degree. Somewhat sombre in mood, and narrow and intolerant in his political creed, he was nevertheless of a kindly disposition, a good husband and father, and a staunch co-operator and trade unionist. Morris afterwards used to ask in a friendly way about him. He, more than any other, was the founder and pioneer of the Social Democratic Federation in Scotland.
It was, as I have said, a curious circumstance that Morris, as a sequel to his meeting earlier in the evening, when his lecture envisaging the glowing hopes of Socialism had seemed to captivate the minds of a vast gathering of the unregenerate public, should have experienced this sudden transition into a small disillusionising assembly of 'elect brethren,' muffled in the spiritual pride and exclusiveness of the old-world sects. No less curious was it that in the person of his Socialist comrade, Nairne, the nemesis of labour without art, and life without joy, of which he had been speaking, should have been so strikingly personified.
Yet the mystery of the Word abides. How much of the seed sown among the 3000 hearers in the St. Andrews Hall took root, and afterwards bore fruit, none can tell. But to the eye that great audience melted away into nothingness, leaving no visible trace, whereas the little group of Socialists remained in being and endured, diffusing forth such light of Socialism as it had, even if it were only as the glow-worm's little ray in the dark.
- ↑ This was an allusion to the Land Restoration League candidatures of Shaw Maxwell and William Forsyth, who contested Parliamentary seats in Glasgow at the General Election, 1884, in opposition to the official Liberal nominees.