The Revival of the Crafts
In 1861 a firm called Morris, Marshall and Faulkner, decorators, was started with the idea of producing things that would be agreeable to live with, well made, and properly designed. This company was formed by a group of men led by William Morris, who was born in 1834, and was the son of a prosperous discount broker. To-day, Morris would be called an escapist, for he loathed the lush complacency of bis own age; despised industry; realised that machinery was being used in the wrong way for the wrong ends; and felt, with the passionate revolutionary sincerity of which great creative minds are capable, that the only hope for England and its skilled and patient people lay in restoring respect for well-made things, by reviving the crafts and bringing back to the life of craftsmen and workmen generally the fun and pleasure and pride in labour which the first industrial revolution had banished.
Like Sir Walter Scott, Morris idealised the Middle Ages; but Gobbett's denunciatory History of the Protestant Reformation was his inspiration rather than Scott's genteel mixture of tinsel and chivalry; so with a generous disregard of realities, he imagined medieval England to be a paradise of joyful work, of singing, happy craftsmen, the home of a great band of Christian brothers, carving stone and wood and painting and gilding, hammering metal into fantastic shapes and colouring glass, all for the glory of God and the crafts. He desired to live in that sort of England himself; and in News from Nowhere he described in loving detail just the sort of society he wanted to create. His country-gentleman's socialism had a gracious quality; his work had a directness, a honesty of purpose, and an unforced gaiety, which brought a new breath of life to design in England, and although some of it was self-conscious and artificial, and although the people he associated with were frequently only mid-Victorian highbrows who thought medieval art was a nice hobby to have, he did restore some of the respect for skilled work that had been lost in the England that confused ornamentation with design. He reminded his countrymen that the executant craftsman could also be a designer, instead of a helpless, willing tool; he believed that the designer should also be an executant craftsman. He detested the dictatorial technique of the man at the drawing board, believing that the man who worked at the bench generally knew more and should not be subservient to a mere fanciful draughtsman. Morris perceived that designers, who were in his day seldom more than men with untrained imaginations overstocked with ornamental notions, whose solitary accomplishment was drawing, had lost their old knowledge of materials; they were widely separated from the executant craftsmen or the mechanics who manifolded their ideas; and he realised that love of materials was the well-spring of English skill. He set about mastering a variety of crafts himself, and threw into this work a prodigious versatility, which enabled him to design and make fabrics, to dye his own materials for weaving, to carve and to decorate woodwork, to design typefaces and to set type and print books, and to make things in wood and metal. His influence grew, and one striking result of it was the founding of the Art Workers' Guild in 1884; another was the encouragement his example gave to a comparatively new figure in English life: the artist-craftsman. Many men who wanted to practise the arts began to turn their creative gifts to the mastery of some craft or group of crafts; and they found that they could develop small industries on a craft basis, which were sometimes successful. These isolated activities, separated from contemporary economic and industrial life, were at first only the palest reflections of the light that blazed from Morris's own work and writings and speeches; but the artist-craftsmen gradually became established. Throughout the country they settled down to work in wood and metal, to weave and to make pottery, and gradually they found patrons. They were wholly ignored by industry, but they began to have an effect upon taste, and although they were quite unaware of performing such a function, they occasionally initiated research work in design from which organised industry ultimately though unconsciously derived benefit.
William Morris and those who helped him to revive handicrafts certainly opened the eyes of their fellow countrymen; but the effect of the Romantic movement and the First Industrial Revolution was still too strong for the English to see clearly. They were without critical standards. They respected the new enthusiasms for good workmanship; and they liked to think of 'hand-made' things; but the results were not gratifying to Morris, nor did they resurrect the English tradition in design. As a master-craftsman, he had during a third of a century edited for his contemporaries the ideas of an England, so old, so out of tune with the turbulent enterprise and seemingly boundless prosperity of Victorian England, that he had, unintentionally, fostered a new respect for old things, based upon the romance of age and not upon merit of design. Industry and trade catered for this new form of taste: metalwork was produced, mechanically speckled with little dents to imitate hammer marks: woodwork was left with roughened surfaces: 'handmade' became a sales story; and as people began to collect antiques, genuine and spurious, the dealer came into his own. The supply of antique furniture, china, pottery and metalwork, was abundant in the late nineteenth century; many things of beauty had been consigned to lumber rooms and attics to make way for the Gothic preferences of Raskin's disciples or for the richly ornamented and obviously comfortable things beloved by most true Victorians; but when genuine antiques began to run short early in the present century, a new occupation for craftsmen was discovered - their skill was used for copying old things and faking the evidence of age. No tyranny of fashion imposed by Renaissance or Jacobean noblemen, no limiting or destruction of skill by machine-production, had forced the wise hands of English craftsmen to act with such dishonour and futility. That debased industry was the worst by-product of Morris's great influence; it preserved an appearance of the English tradition, but, like the embalmed corpse at an ancient Egyptian feast, it was without life. But the work of the artist-craftsmen who were originally inspired by Morris, enjoyed a splendid vitality. It was partly through their individual skill that some lost threads of the English tradition of design were picked up.
Perhaps the most outstanding of these artist-craftsmen was Ernest Gimson (1864-1919), whose genius found expression in cabinet-making, metal-work, embroidery, modelled plaster and bookbinding. Men like Gimson and Sidney Barnsley, with whom for a time he was in partnership, did not pick up the threads of the English tradition from the point where they had been severed in the eighteen-thirties. They ignored the golden age of design, forgot everything that had happened between 1660 and 1830, and began where the mid-seventeenth-century English crafts men had left off, thus recapturing, without antiquarian research or respectful imitation, a true line of medieval development, because they shared with the craftsmen of puritan England the same approach to the problem of using tools and materials and adjusting means to ends. There was nothing arrogant in their failure to acknowledge the existence of the great architects and cabinet-makers and potters and silversmiths of the eighteenth century; it was just a Ruskinian attitude of mind to regard those highly civilised men of genius as interlopers who had betrayed the English tradition and enslaved the crafts.
Between them, Ruskin and Morris in their vastly different ways did much to confuse and muddle the whole subject of industrial design, and to delay its identification as a characteristic manifestation of the machine age that was susceptible to study and creative direction. But the revival of the crafts in the latter part of the nineteenth century at least re-established an appreciative though limited understanding of pre-Renaissance English design, and initiated developments in cabinet-making, pottery, and the weaving and printing of textiles, that eventually affected industrial design.
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