Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

Morris. Morris lived in the Victorian era, during what was called the Industrial Revolution. That included, partially, the disappearance of the crafts and their replacement by factory products. This worried William Morris, the idea that craftsmanship—that is, what is made with love—could be lost and replaced by the impersonal, commercial products of the factories. It’s interesting that the English government was also worried about this. We see this in the case ofLockwood Kipling—Kipling’s father and a friend of Burne-Jones and William Morris—whom the British government sent to India to defend Hindu crafts from the inundation of commercial products from England itself. 13 Lockwood Kipling was also an excellent draftsman.
    Morris was interested in the crafts and the guilds. Not so that the workers could earn more—though he was interested in that as well—but in the sense that the workers were personally interested in their labor and carried out some kind of work of love. And so William Morris was one of the fathers of socialism in England and one of the first members of theFabian Society, to which Bernard Shaw, who was one of his disciples, belonged. The society took that name because during the Punic Wars there was a Roman general who was given the name Fabius Cunctator, “Fabius the Delayer,” for he believed that the best way to defeat the enemies of the fatherland was like our Montoneros when they fought against the generals of independence, or what the guerrillas do, or the Boers in South Africa. 14 That is, not to engage in battle but rather to tire out the organized armies against whom they are fighting, by leading them from one place to another—tiring them out, leading them to places with bad pasture for horses, which is what the Irish did to Essex. 15 So this socialist society is founded in London, because the members of that society did not believe in revolution, they believed that socialism should be imposed bit by bit, without forcing events.
    In a way, this is what has happened. I was in London a few years ago. I had to have a small operation, and when I asked the doctor about his fee, he answered that I had to sign a document, that was all, that he was a doctor responsible for attending to, and if necessary, operating on, people who needed him within a certain area of London. And he told me that he was an employee of the government, so I had only to pay for the medicine. A poor man can be treated by the king’s surgeon.
    So we have Morris as a socialist, as one of the father’s of English socialism. Moreover, he often spoke in Hyde Park to convince people of the advantages of socialism. His biographers say that he did so with very little tact, that he once engaged a worker in conversation and said to him, “I have been raised and born a gentleman. But now, as you can see, I converse with people from every class.” Which couldn’t have been very flattering to his interlocutor.
    Morris was—I will say in passing—a robust man, with a red beard; and someone once asked him if he was Captain So-and-so, the captain of a ship called, poetically,
Sirena
. He liked very much that he would be taken for the captain of a ship. And Morris was interested in design, the arts of carpentry and cabinetmaking, and he founded a company for the decorative arts—Morris & Marshall—for decorating houses. Still, in England, you can find “Morris chairs,” which were designed and even made by him, because he was interested in manual labor; he liked it. 16 Being a writer, he was also interested in typography and founded the Kelmscott Press. 17 At home I have a few volumes from Saga Library, which he founded, which published his translations of the Icelandic sagas done by him in collaboration with EiríkrMagnússon, which he translated into a slightly archaic English. 18 Then he also published an edition ofChaucer. 19 Chaucer was one of his idols. There is a book of his dedicated to Chaucer. He says to his book that if he met Chaucer in person—he speaks to his book, as Ovid did to some of his—he should greet him by name and tell him, “O, master, who is great of heart and tongue.” 20 He came to feel he had a kind of personal friendship with Chaucer.
    So, there is Morris as a political innovator—socialism was a novelty at the time—and as an innovator in design and the decorative arts—he built and designed many houses, including his own house, “the red house,” built in the outskirts of