William Morris is quoted everywhere as having said ‘You can’t have art without resistance in the material(s)’. Some say ‘materials’ and some say ‘material’. I looked everywhere in his works but I didn’t find this sentence. Did William Morris ever say it? Bethanie Nowviskie says the phrase was reported by Henry Halliday Sparling, Morris’s son in law, in 1924. But she doesn’t give a reference to the work, and confusingly seems to attribute the quote to Sparling. So I looked it up. The book is H. Halliday Sparling (1924). The Kelmscott Press and William Morris Master-Craftsman, MacMillan: London, page 14. It's a nicely printed book on quality paper. Here's a transcript of the relevant bits with page-breaks:
[13] Morris condemned the typewriter for creative work; it was “all right for journalism and the like; there’s nothing to be said for that! For hastily written copy, which doesn’t matter anyway, it may be desirable, or for a chap who can't write clearly—I daresay the Commonweal compositors would be glad enough were Blank to go in for one!—but it’s out of the place in imaginative work or work that’s meant to be permanent. Any- thing that gets between a man’s hand and his work, you see, is more or less bad for him. There's a pleasant feel in the paper under one’s hand and the pen between one’s fingers that has its own part in the work done .... I always write with a quill be- cause it’s fuller in the hand for its weight, and carries ink better —good ink—than a steel pen.... I don’t like the typewriter or [14] the pneumatic brush—that thing for blowing ink on to the paper—because they come between the hand and its work, as I’ve said, and again because they make things too easy. The minute you make the executive part of the work too easy, the less thought there is in the result. And you can't have art with- out resistance in the material. No! The very slowness with which the pen or brush moves over the paper, or the graver goes through the wood, has its value. And it seems to me, too, that with a machine one’s mind would be apt to be taken off the work at whiles by the machine sticking or what not.”
So firstly, Morris didn’t actually say that. Sparling reports a long quotation that is probably only paraphrased, so the words may well be Sparling’s. And secondly, what does it mean ‘you can’t have art without resistance in the material’ (not ‘materials’)? It’s an arts and crafts argument: an airbrush or a typewriter takes away the feeling between the artist or the author and the paper, and this messes it up. Another point he makes is that when the tool makes drawing, engraving or writing too easy the less thought goes into the result.
Morris did speak of the resistance in the material being something to be overcome in Hopes and Fears for Art (1882):
Up to a certain point you must be the master of your material, but you must never be so much the master as to turn it surly, so to say. You must not make it your slave, or presently you will be a slave also. You must master it so far as to make it express a meaning, and to serve your aim at beauty.
This is, curiously, a different point. Mastery of the material effects of writing, engraving or painting makes you forget that your true purpose is to create art. You must make the materials work for you, not allow them to dictate what you produce.
