William Morris: A Life for Our Time.

By Fiona MacCarty. London: Faber & Faber. 1994. 25 [pounds], $50(CAN). 780pp

Genius needs re-evaluation in each generation. The things that the really great people of the past can teach us always have to be re-assessed in our own times. In her new biography, Fiona MacCarthy has heroically attempted the awesome task of re-interpreting William Morris for our age.

She has made a good book which crafts and hews a portrait of an extremely complex personality: loving and much loved yet acerbic, prone to fits of uncontrollable rage and almost violence. Morris often seems macho in his worship of the saga heroes and strong male friendships -- yet had a tenderness and empathy more usually associated with the feminine, and though his own marriage was something of a disaster, he was certainly capable of intense relationships with women, notably every modern person's nineteenth-century darling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, the wife of his best friend Edward. Perhaps he did have a physical affair with her, but unlike Eric Gill, the subject of MacCarthy's last biography (AR March 1989), William and Georgiana kept the details of their love even from private diaries.

He had titanic energy (presumably the existence of servants made the Victorians far more productive than we, but that is far from being the only reason why we often seem puny incomparison). And he had talents enough for 10 men. Yet while he was a great designer, (occasionally) a great poet, a fine craftsman, and a brilliant political visionary and polemicist, he was not perhaps head-and-shoulders above his all contemporaries in any particular field. What matters more than anything else is the wholeness of his character and the complexity of his developing vision.

He was a very successful Victorian businessman, with a shop in Oxford Street, yet he hated `ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich'. His wonderful transformations of the three-dimensional world of nature to the two dimensions of wallpaper and fabrics inspired generations of designers, yet he believed that a proper building needs no applied decoration. He was one of the first to understand the importance of the ecological imperative, yet he was known, from time to time, to pollute the river Wandle with dyes from his factory, Merton Abbey. He extolled handwork, yet installed one of the first automated processes in his Jacquard looms, which used punched cards to eliminate some of the most tedious processes in traditional weaving. He was a capitalist who became a communist, and one of the most difficult things to understand about his life is the way in which the transformation came about.

MacCarthy makes far more sense of his paradoxes than any previous biographer because she has had access to previously unavailable papers. She has taken the trouble to read every word that he wrote and to go to all the places that had emotional importance for him, even the black and snowy deserts of Iceland, and the? dreadful dullness of Bad Ems, the German spa where his wife recuperated from one of her innumerable illnesses. MacCarthy loves him, and teaches us to do so too.

Morris was driven by a fate as strong as those of his saga heroes. His passion for architecture, for the small old grey Gothic churches and cottages of England, led him to help found the Society for die Protection of Ancient Buildings. The understanding that such buildings are the common inheritance of us all gradually caused him to become a revolutionary communist, spurning Parliament as a cabal of established interests (as it was then, and certainly is now in a different way).

For a decade, in the 1880s, he threw his volcanic powers into the hellish maelstrom of the endlessly fissiparous nineteenth-century socialist groups, by preaching on street corners, marching in parades and using every spare minute to scribble in support of the cause. In doing so, he alienated most of his best friends for a while, and it would be easy to say (as did Engels) that his political work was virtually worthless. It was not the groups to which he gave so much of his energies finally created a semblance of socialism in Britain after the Second World War, but the Fabians who understood how to take power in local government and Parliament.

Yet that wonderful and terribly flawed dawn of a decent society that never quite came off was deeply influenced by Morris. In the novels of the last few years of his life he had had the guts to envisage what a post-revolutionary society might be like -- unlike Marx for whom the dialectical struggle was almost all. The Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was a devotee of News from Nowhere and the Dream of John Ball. They may be a bit fey, but England would doubtless have been a different place without their gentle and noble inspiration -- looking much more like the suburbs of Moscow than it does.

As MacCarthy points out, one of the problems with Morris's political theory is that he did not believe in original sin. Yet if he had done so, he could never have made his visions. Now we live in a time in which original sin is worshipped. The Leninist brand of communism (state capitalism which Morris would have hated) may have collapsed, but the vile post-Thatcher and post-Reagan world in which we live is still dominated by their celebration of greed, and their disdain for any notion of society. The rotten and deceitful slime of Post-Modern Classicism is continually smeared over our cities, and the countryside is increasingly eaten up by smug and polluting suburbs.

Against this crude and vulgar world, Morris's noble and generous visions, and the example of his life (however flawed), give hope that we can still strive for decency. Thank goodness for MacCarthy, who has explained him for us: She is right to give her book the subtitle A Life for Our Time. How much England (which he loved so well, and wanted to change so much) needs Morris's inspiration now. MacCarthy should send her fine book to the politicians. Those architects and designers who have even a glimmering of understanding of their calling will buy it with love.