At first Morris inclined, in politics, to the Radical section of the Liberal party, but in Jan. 1883 he joined the Democratic Fed eration, soon afterwards becoming treasurer of the party. On Dec. 3o, 1884, he and others seceded from the Federation and formed the Socialist League, largely on the grounds that parliamentary action on which the leaders of the Federation tended to concen trate, was premature. Morris was appointed treasurer and editor of the monthly organ of the new League, the Commonweal, to which he later contributed his Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere. The League started by repudiating State Socialism, and later became definitely opposed to parliamentary action. Morris lectured and spoke at meetings, and was several times arrested for obstruction in open-air meetings. But he was beginning to see that the time was not ripe for revolution. In 1890 the Anarchist sec tion of the Socialist League became dominant, and Morris had to relinquish the editorship of the Commonweal. He still kept up with the Hammersmith Branch, which became independent, and met at Kelmscott House until its dissolution in 1892. But from this time on he took up a negative position. His News from No where, published in book form in 1891, is a delightful and inspiring book, and a classic of the English movement, describing an Eng land in which the socialist commonwealth has been realized.
Long before that time, however, Morris had returned to art and literature. When his business was enlarged in 1881 by the establishment of a tapestry industry at Merton, in Surrey, Morris found yet another means for expressing the mediaevalism that inspired all his work, whether on paper or at the loom—or indeed in political thought. In 1887 he published his translation of the Odyssey. He then added another to his multitudinous activities; he assumed a direct interest in typography. The House of the Wolf ings, which was printed in 1889 at the Chiswick Press, was the first essay in this direction ; and in the same year, in The Roots of the Mountains, he carried his theory a step further. Some 15 months later he added a private printing-press to his multifarious occupa tions, and started upon the first volume issued from the Kelmscott Press, his own Glittering Plain. For the last few years of his life this new interest remained the absorbing one.
His last piece of work, decidedly the crowning glory of his printing-press, was the Kelmscott Chaucer, which had taken nearly two years to print, and fully five to plan and mature. It was
finished in June 1896. His vigour had been slowly declining for some time, and he sank gradually during the autumn, dying on Oct. 3, 1896. He was buried in Kelmscott churchyard.
Essentially the child of the Gothic revival, he had put an ineffaceable stamp on Victorian ornament and design, his place being that of a follower of Ruskin and Pugin, but with a greater practical influence than either. In house decoration of all kinds —furniture, wall-papers and hangings (which he preferred to paper), carpet-weaving, and the painting of glass and tiles, needle work, tapestry—he formed a school which was dominated by his protest against commercialism and his assertion of the necessity for natural decoration and pure colour, produced by hand work and inspired by a passion for beauty irrespective of cheapness or quickness of manufacture.
His friend Swinburne said that he was always more truly in spired by literature than by life. His socialism was tinged by a passionate enthusiasm for an inaccessible artistic ideal. Morris, indeed, was not primarily interested in men at all, but in objects. His poetry deals, it is true, with the human passions, but the emo tion is always seen as in a picture ; he is more concerned with the attitude of the group than with the realization of a character. But the spirit of beauty breathes in every line ; a sense of music and of colour is everywhere abundant. Nor does the poet lack power and vigour when an adventurous story is told. Over all hangs the faint atmosphere of mediaevalism, of an England of green gardens and grey towers, of a London "small and white and clean," of chivalry and adventure in every brake. The critic has also to remember the historical value of Morris's literary influence, fol lowing upon the prim domesticities of early Victorian verse, and breaking in upon Tennyson's least happy phase of natural homeli ness.
See the Life and Letters, in 2 vols., by J. W. Mackail ; also H. Jack son, William Morris (1908) ; J. B. Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement (1921) ; H. H. Sparling, The Kelmscott Press and William Morris (1924) ; G. Fritzsche, William Morris' Sozialismus and anarchistischer Kommunismus with bibli ography (192 7) .