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COPYRIGHT 2007 ELT Press
WILLIAM MORRIS does not figure prominently in literary histories of the late nineteenth century, in spite of the fact that from around 1888 until his death in 1896 he wrote ten prose romances. While many historians of the period acknowledge Morris's early influence on the aesthetic movement through Walter Pater's famous "Conclusion" to The Renaissance (written originally for a review of Morris's poetry), they tend to emphasize the elitist, separatist impulses of aestheticism (and, more properly, of Decadence) at the expense of its popular middle-class origins in romance and home decoration, which could be linked more readily to Morris than to many other writers who have canonical status within the period. In her important 1994 article, "A Critique of Practical Aesthetics," Regenia Gagnier reads the divergent tendencies within aestheticism as generally escapist or transformative, and makes room for Morris as a central figure in the movement (without, however, taking on the romances). Grouping Morris with Ruskin and Wilde as practical aesthetes, Gagnier sees the common link among them as the desire for different kinds of freedom from poverty, from hierarchy, from conventional thought and behavior. The practical aesthetes believed art could make individuals free in a free society; while the Decadents, she argues, feared the freedom of others and saw art only as privately liberating, the only space--"a tiny, safe space--of freedom." (1)
Morris's late romances suffer from critical neglect, because they seem to represent the final, decadent phase of an otherwise aesthetically innovative or socially committed career. In the last years of his life, Morris left the Socialist League, maintaining his connection only with the independent Hammersmith Socialist League, which put the date for socialist revolution far in the future; he founded the Kelmscott Press, which was dedicated to the production of beautiful, handcrafted books; and he wrote ornate, archaic prose romances that would be intelligible to, though unread by, subsequent generations as sword-and-sorcery fantasies. Why would an artist so committed to doing and making turn to apparently unproductive dreaming and looking?
A hostile reviewer once criticized Morris for describing "a state of things which does not exist, and propos[ing], as a cure for it, a state of things which could not possibly exist." (2) For many late-Victorian readers, Morris's prose romances offered abundant proof of this assertion, for they seemed to be merely the literary accompaniment to a Gothic Revival that could not put down roots in the nineteenth century. A smaller number of admirers hoped that Morris's romances would teach people how to live aesthetically in a world from which beauty had all but vanished. Two now-familiar arguments followed from these contemporary responses: the romances represent a turning away from practical considerations of social and aesthetic reform, embodying an increasingly decadent and decorative conception of art for art's sake; or, the romances have "internalized" socialism and are therefore continuous with Morris's political commitment rather than a deviation from it. (3) Instead of rehearsing the claims on either side of this debate, I want to take a step backward and consider the quality and aims of Morris's literary project in the late romances, in particular his relationship to the period's aestheticism. The turn to romance is unequivocally a turn to aestheticism, an acceptance of its terms for the conduct of life, which, indeed, he was instrumental in creating; however, Morris adopts the romance form not in order to escape from the world, but rather to reform it from within an ethos of absolute idealism.
While Morris's earlier political utopias certainly contained elements of romance, and depended on the waking dreams of characters who were guests in the past or future, the romances of the 1890s turn away from what was a practical aesthetic toward a mode of storytelling that seems frequently escapist, nostalgic, or even Decadent. He eschews the socialist aesthetics of A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere and even the historicism of the Germanic romances The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains in favor of an older mode of romancing, one which describes an inward condition whose translatability into objective reality depends on subjective desire and will. As Northrop Frye wrote, true romances radiate "a glow of subjective intensity"; or, as one contemporary critic put it, one cannot read a Morris romance unless he too burns with desire. (4) In the late romances, Morris continually prioritizes active over passive looking, for his heroes and his readers. Social transformation now depends on inner sight, visionary dreaming, rather than on the givens of the external world. In Gagnier's terms, however, this is precisely the foundation of practical aesthetics, a self-determining subjectivity, and the sole means of escape from internalized state power.
In a curiously oblique approach to finding Morris's place within the aesthetic movement, Norman Kelvin counted up the number of citations the major writers of the period received from their near contemporary, Holbrook Jackson, in The Eighteen Nineties (1913). Morris was in third place, after Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and tied with the Yellow Book and Max Beerbohm. For most students of the period, these four other names might stand as the representative figures of the decade, while William Morris is more likely to be grouped with older Victorian reformers such as Carlyle and Ruskin. (5) One of a centenary collection of essays published in Victorian Poetry, Kelvin's brief article is important, because he forces us to reconsider Morris-the-social-reformer's relationship to one of the central tenets of aestheticism the autonomy of art. (6) For Kelvin, and certainly for Morris, art for art's sake is "problematic," residing uneasily with the socialist's commitment to making life beautiful for everyone and to transforming alienated laborers into contented craftsmen. If, as Kelvin suggests, we situate Morris's work synchronously with the other writers and artists responsible for shaping the decade, (7) then the six late romances, which represent a prodigious amount of writing in the last five or six years of his life, look more like the vigorous response of a still great artist to the mood of his times, rather than the nostalgic reaction of an old man at war with the future.
Two brief allusions in the Collected Letters--the first to Robert Louis Stevenson and the second to Oscar Wilde--offer hints of how Morris himself might have situated his romances within the broader literary context of the period. (8) In a letter to George Bernard Shaw dated 14 October 1886, Morris comments on Stevenson's popular romances, Treasure Island and Kidnapped. Morris "was much pleased by both," and his criticism of each work suggests what he would have found important or even indispensable in the construction of a romantic tale. In Morris's view, Treasure Island was a composite text, a mixture of three earlier romances: R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone (1869), Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and Captain Marryat's Masterman Ready (1841). Surprisingly, after warning Shaw that he was about to be "critical and disagreeable," Morris concludes by saying there is "no harm in that after all." (9) As we will see when we come to our discussion of Morris's romances, one of the charms of the genre is its repetitiveness in the use of stock phrases, images, and situations which impart the conviction that these are tales often told. Tellingly, Morris prefers Kidnapped as "the more artistic work," because "the book is full of admirable pictures." (10) Morris would follow Stevenson's example in creating works full of "admirable pictures," a tendency of the genre well described by Stevenson himself in "A Gossip on Romance," an essay originally published in 1882 in the first number of Longman's Magazine and collected afterwards in Memories and Portraits (1887). Morris certainly might have read Stevenson's essay, which celebrates the kinds of romances he read in his youth, very much the same precursors that Morris evokes in his brief analysis of Treasure Island.
In the essay, Stevenson makes a case for extending the kind of reading we do in childhood across the whole of one's life. It is a reading both "absorbing and voluptuous," which, if it is "fit to be called by the name of reading," will put pictures in our heads and sounds in our ears that come between ourselves and our everyday life: "The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye." (11) Stevenson's own memory is stocked with the pictures of romance, never-forgotten images that haunt him throughout his adult life, that continue to shape how he sees the world around him. For the romantic imagination, every place has its genius--its proper story. A great romance fits the right story with the right place, a process that begins and ends in the making of pictures. Indeed, the very purpose of the story seems to be getting from one striking image to the next: "The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration." (12) For Stevenson, this is "the plastic part of literature"--what makes literature a visual art and not just words printed sequentially on a page. (13)
In language that pretends to be more whimsical and lighthearted than it actually is, Stevenson delivers a full-blown theory of romance, which for the sake of neatness he distinguishes from drama (though the realist novel of the age might have done as well): "Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance," equating drama with the active pleasure we take in life and romance with the passive. (14) In drama, we become involved in the lives of others and actively participate in their stories as moral agents ourselves; we judge other individuals and their choices, while in romance, we tend to identify with the hero and allow ourselves to be carried along on his adventures. Stevenson thus presents a paradoxical reversal; even as he claims that romance always centers on incident, he denies that its pleasures are those of the active mind--romance makes us look, but it does not make...
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