William Morris's Culture of Nature

IV The Object of Work 1. Decent surroundings It has been well-established that during the mid to late 1870s Morris became increasingly involved in public political debate, I and that in lectures and letters to the press he began to produce an educating, agitating discourse formulated initially upon his 'hopes and fears for art'.2 More recently, particular attention has been drawn to the ways that Morris's writings on art and society reveal 'a deep and resonant late nineteenth-century critique of contemporary environmental and social devastation'? These discussions have explored Morris's views on the preservation of 'the environment',4 and have tended to emphasise the 'eco-communal' or 'green' aspects of his work. Certainly the desire to protect and preserve the 'beauty of the earth' is a significant feature of Morris's rhetoric at this time. Yet perhaps more fundamental to his lectures and letters of the late 1870s and early 1880s is a concern to establish 'decent surroundings': to offer a view of the earth as a place of human habitation. Nature played an important, though not always central, role in his arguments. Yet what is apparent from the way he discusses nature is his increasing awareness that nature and humanity are interlinked, and that nature is frequently the object of human I Morris's first venture into politics was his involvement in the debate surrounding the 'Eastern Question'. In early 1876 a bankrupt Turkish government retaliated against an uprising of Christians in their Bulgarian province by massacring thousands. Morris was angered when Disraeli's Conservative Government proposed that Britain should intervene on behalf of Turkey against the threat of a Russian invasion. Morris (,To the Working-men of England', pamphlet issued on I I May 1878; in The Letters of William Morris to his Family and Friends, cd. P. Henderson, Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1950, Appendix II, p. 389) vigorously opposed any British involvement in what he felt would be an 'unjust war against a people who are not our enemies, against Europe, against freedom, against nature, against the hope of the world'. Consequently, he served as Treasurer of the Eastern Question Association, and spoke at a number of meetings on behalf of this group. See Morris's pamphlet 'To the Working-men of England' (quoted above), and his letters throughout 1876-78, particularly his first on this topic to the Daily News, 24 October 1876, in Letters, vol. I. pp. 323-6. 2 Hopes and Fears for Art is the title of the first volume of lectures published by Morris in 1882. For a biographical outline and general discussion of Morris's activities during these years, see, for example, Mackail, Life, vol. 1, pp. 338-75, and vol. II, pp. 1-90; Thompson, Romantic to Revolutionary, pp. 192-274, and MacCarthy, A Life for Our Time, pp. 375--461 . .1 Florence S. Boos, 'An Aesthetic Ecocommunist: Morris the Red and Morris the Green', unpublished revised version of her paper 'Morris the Green', presented at the William Morris Centenary Conference, Exeter College, Oxford, 27 June 1996, p. 31. 4 One needs to be aware, of course, that in the late twentieth century the words 'environment' and 'environmental' carry much more emphasis on nature than they did in the late nineteenth century. Whereas today's 'environmental groups' are likely to be concerned with the preservation or reconstitution of 'natural' surroundings, Morris and his contemporaries understood 'environment' in broader, less explicitly naturalistic terms. In this chapter, the environment is understood in these broad terms. 147 work. Thus in the early, 'pre-Marxian' lectures discussed here,s it is necessary to be aware of both the socio-aesthetic basis of his 'environmental' concern, and his growing social awareness. The first, broadly environmental group with which Morris became involved was the S.P.A.B. Morris's reasons for founding the Society in 1877, and his active and conscientious endeavours on its behalf, have been well discussed. 6 Familiar with debates on protection and restoration since an early age,7 his association with'Anti Scrape' was deep and enduring. Of particular interest here is the way and extent to which ideas about nature informed his work for the Society, and, perhaps more importantly, the way his work for the Society informed his ideas about nature. The S.P.A.B. was most concerned, of course, with the built environment and therefore not directly involved in issues relating to landscape or nature conservation. Yet the Society did partake of a wider environmental ethic, which was a result of Morris's influence over its principles and proceedings. This is apparent from the first letter to The Athenaeum in which Morris suggested that an association might be established to save buildings such as the Minster of Tewkesbury from the restoring zeal of architects such as Sir Gilbert Scott. In this letter he also directed his appeal to 'whatever else of beautiful or historical is still left us on the sites of the ancient buildings we were once so famous for'. He argued that 'watching over and protecting' such 'wonderful treasures' could prove particularly valuable in 'this age of the world, 5 This is to indicate that the discussion in this chapter is limited to those lectures delivered before Morris read Marx, and before he declared himself a socialist in 1883. 6 Morris wrote many, often passionate, letters on behalf of the Society between 1877 and his death. He drafted its Manifesto (which the Society still adheres to), wrote many reports and examined numerous buildings on the S.P.A.B.'s behalf. Moreover, as MacCarthy (A Life for Our Time. p. 416) has noted, in spite of his many other commitments, Morris regularly attended S.P.A.B. meetings. For further discussion of Morris's activities on behalf of the S.P.A.B., see Lethaby, Philip Webb, pp. 146 59; Chris Miele, 'The Conservationist', in V&A Catalogue, pp. 72-87; and Frank C. Sharp, 'A Lesson in International Relations: Morris and the S.P.A.B.', lWMS, vol. X, no. 2, Spring 1993, pp. 9 15. 7 Morris's knowledge of architectural restoration derived from a number of sources. Interested in architecture from an early age, he was, of course, a keen reader of Ruskin and an ex-employee of Street, both of whom were aware of the dangers of 'restoration'. Morris would also have been aware about debates on restoration in The Ecclesiologist, The Athenaeum, The Builder and The Church Builder. Thus as early as 1855 he noted in a letter to Cormell Price (6 July 1855, in Letters, vol. I, p. 13) that the cathedral at Ely had been 'horribly spoilt with very well meant restorations, as they facetiously term them'. 343 when the newly-invented study of living history is the chief joy of so many lives,.8 Later, he clarified his aims in the Manifesto of the Society, in which he indicated that it was as 'monuments of art' that he wished to protect these ancient buildings,9 and in all of his addresses on behalf of the Society he sought, as E.P. Thompson noted, 'to convince the unconverted of the existence of beauty, and to explain to them something of its meaning and its value'. 10 As Morris asserted at the Twelfth Annual Meeting in 1889, though 'Podsnap political, Podsnap social, Pods nap scientific' might not recognise the value of the pleasure of beauty, '[t]he capacity of seeing beauty means the capacity for art' .11 Thus the S.P.A.B. can be more broadly conceived as a society for the protection, and promotion, of beauty. The concept of beauty invoked by Morris in this context was derived from the Ruskinian aesthetic he had assimilated at Oxford. As noted above, Ruskin's 'organic' conception of art, architecture and the beautiful was founded upon specific ideas about the relationship between the artist and nature. In The Seven Lamps ojArchitecture he had argued that 'it is out of the power of man to conceive beauty without ... [Nature's] aid', 12 thereby indicating that nature was essential to the inception of all forms of art, including architccture. Ruskin's and Morris's call for the protection of ancient buildings, and particularly their insistence on the protection of medieval buildings can be seen, therefore, as a call to defend the monuments of a time when, as Ruskin had argued in 'The Nature of Gothic', 'man' had been closer to nature. For both Ruskin and Morris, it was not just the buildings that mattered, but what they represented, and how that representation spoke ojthe nature of past generations to present and future ones. Thus Morris urged a S.P.A.B. audience in 1879 to understand that the 'thin starved work' and 'smooth, tame, rubbed-down pieces of stone' of a 'restored North Porch of Westminster Abbey' would say nothing of the art of the thirteenth century: could be 'like nothing that is or could be in nature' .13 R Morris to the Editor of The Athenaeum, 5 March 1877, in Letters, vol. I, p. 351. 9 Morris. 'Manifesto of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings on its Foundation in 1877', in AWS, vol. I, p. 109. 10 Thompson, Romantic to Revolutionary (1955), p. 273. II Morris, . Address at the Twelfth Annual Meeting' [or the S.P.A.B.), 3 July 1889, in A WS, vol. I, pp. 147-8. 12 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps ofArchitecture, p. 141. I.l Morris, 'Address at the Second Annual Meeting, 28 June 1879', in AWS, vol. I, p.

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