The completion of _Sigurd the Volsung_ may conveniently be treated as
a half-way house in Morris's career. The poet had fully proved
himself. The lovely morning song of _Guenevere_, a little uncertain
both in its own expression of life and in the direction along which
it pointed the singer's development, but nevertheless clearly the
promise of some memorable doings in the world of poetry, had matured
through the simple clarity and joyousness of _Jason_ and _The Earthly
Paradise_ into this fierce and elemental strength, corrected as it
were from step to step by the practical experience of the poet's
daily life. At the beginning of the translation of the Völsunga Saga
he had written--
So draw ye round and hearken, English Folk,
Unto the best tale pity ever wrought--
and now he had fashioned that tale anew into its greatest
presentment, raising its spirit into an expression worthy to rank
with the supreme masterpieces of the world. His creativeness as poet
had not exhausted itself, but it had achieved its most urgent
purpose; it had evolved a life which the poet's imaginative longing
told him might yet be realized on earth. From this time the business
of setting the crooked straight among the affairs of his day began to
absorb his attention and energy, and in the outcome he published but
one more book of poems, which will be considered later. In 1875 he
had printed his verse translation of _The Aeneids of Virgil_, about
which, as was inevitable, the opinion of classical scholars was, and
remains, divided. There is a quality in poetry which is finally
untranslatable from one language to another, the quality that is knit
into the words themselves. The ecstasy of which I have spoken is
capable of a thousand shades of spiritual colour, and when a poet is
moved by it he is moved by it in a kind that can never be precisely
repeated, either in himself or another. The translator as a rule
gives us the substance and loses this other quality altogether; the
most that we can hope for is that he may be a poet himself, and,
retaining the substance, substitute an ecstasy of his own which shall
in some measure compensate for the loss of the particular exaltation
of the original. This Morris does; reading his translation we
may--indeed must--miss some essential Virgilian quality, but we have
the great story faithfully told, and we have poetry. We may continue
to ask for more than that, but we shall continue to be denied. This
translation was followed by _The Odyssey_ in 1887 and _Beowulf_ in
1895.
The growth of Morris's socialism can fortunately be traced without
divergence into chronological data. Of its nature we have already
seen something in considering his poetry, but in _A Dream of John
Ball_ and _News from Nowhere_ he defined it in detail, not only in
its imaginative but also in its practical aspect. Before turning to
these it will be well briefly to outline his movements in the later
years of his life. The business of Morris and Company had already
passed into his own hands, not without some difficulty--though
without friction--in closing the partnership arrangements. This
really meant but little added labour, as he had in effect been
responsible for its control almost since its commencement. In 1877
he was asked whether he would accept the Professorship of Poetry at
Oxford in the event of its being offered to him, and declined
emphatically though graciously enough. In the next year he moved to
the house on the Mall at Hammersmith to which was attached the
lecture room where the early meetings of the Hammersmith Socialists
were held, and his active propagandist work had begun. In addition
to constant meetings and lectures on socialism and art, the conduct
of his paper _The Commonweal_, and his own business affairs, he
undertook any work that came to his hand for the furtherance of his
fixed ideal. Among other things he was one of the founders and the
first secretary of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient
Buildings, and finally he linked to his name the brief but noble
career of the Kelmscott Press. He died on the 3rd of October, 1896,
at the age of sixty-three, and was buried in the churchyard at
Kelmscott, wearied out but not embittered by the strife of his later
years and the insults of people who could only feel the vigour of his
blows without understanding the cause in which they were struck.
_A Dream of John Ball_ was published in 1888. In it Morris gives
once again a picture of that life lived in close contact with earth
which he so earnestly desired, but it is not the complete life of
_The Earthly Paradise_ or _News from Nowhere_. The people are not
yet free, although they have not yet fallen to the indifference to
freedom that Morris looked upon as the most distressing manifestation
of his own day. Together with this picture we have a long discussion
between John Ball, the people's priest, and the dreamer--Morris
himself--as to the result of the risings that are then taking shape,
and the future of civilization. The hope that the priest cries out
to the people from the village cross becomes in turn the hope of
Morris for his own generation, and slowly, in the talk that follows,
the dreamer outlines the whole cause and effect of the evil that is
analysed much more closely in _News from Nowhere_; the age of
commercial tyranny that shall come will be strong in its days because
the slaves will nurse the hope that they themselves may rise to the
seats of the tyrants in turn--'and this shall be the very safeguard
of all rule and law in those days.' John Ball speaks with the voice
of Morris. When he was in prison he--
'lay there a-longing for the green fields and the white-thorn
bushes and the lark singing over the corn, and the talk of good
fellows round the ale-house bench, and the babble of the little
children, and the team on the road and the beasts afield, and all
the life of earth.'
The book need not be considered in detail in connection with Morris's
socialism, for it is but a suggestion, whilst _News from Nowhere_ is
an elaborate statement. But it contains certain words that were very
close to Morris's heart. The recognition, for example, that humanity
cannot reach the simplicity that he conceived to be its finest end
without much thought and careful fostering, or in other words that
this simplicity was not the product of barbarism but of a highly
perfected state of evolution, finds expression in the frank
acceptance by this clear-headed and high-hearted priest of the value
of his companion's scholarship. In this book, as always, Morris kept
his work definitely in the region of imaginative art. Not only is
the descriptive writing vivid and full of beauty, but he retains
throughout the full power of literary illusion. This is very
strikingly shown in the pages where the priest questions the dreamer
as to what will be the end of that distant day of oppression of which
they are speaking. Will a new and clear day break on us? As we read
through to the answer we become deeply concerned as to what it will
be, as though we were listening indeed to one speaking with
authority; and when we find that it is one of hopefulness and courage
we feel strangely and splendidly reassured. We know again that the
finest persuasiveness is that of art.
_News from Nowhere_ appeared in America in 1890 and in England in
1891. It has been, perhaps, the most popular of all Morris's
writings, but curiously under-estimated by his critics both as a
practical enunciation of his social creed and as an embodiment of his
social vision. The scheme of the book is very simple. The
narrator--Morris again, of course--goes to bed one winter night at
his Hammersmith house. He wakes to a fresh June morning in an
altered world. The life of this world, the new communism somewhere
in the twenty-second century, he describes at length, and weaves into
it a long conversation with one of its old men which traces the
course by which it has grown from the nineteenth century and defines
the errors which it has cancelled. The constitution of this life may
be assailable at certain points, and some of the steps by which it
has been reached--the armed revolution for instance--may be arbitrary
in conception, but these things are of no moment. The important fact
is that Morris's indictment of our contemporary social system is
perfectly logical at every point, and that the new life that he
creates is complete in its humanity and not that of a misty world of
dreams. Of its prophetic value it is impossible to speak; as to that
we can decide in our imagination alone. But to suggest that the book
is not consistently conscious of the true nature of our social
defects on its negative side, and on its positive side fiercely alive
to the real meaning of life, is merely to misunderstand it and its
subject. Some examination on both these sides is necessary in
support of this statement, and its negative or destructive teaching
is to be considered first.
Men should have joy in the work of their hands, and they had none.
That, in Morris's view, was the fundamental evil to be cured, and he
seeks at the outset to discover its cause. Says Hammond, who acts as
spokesman for the new people--
'Go and have a look at the sheep-walks high up the slopes between
Ingleborough and Pen-y-gwent and tell me if you think we waste
the land there by not covering it with factories for making
things that nobody wants, which was the chief business of the
nineteenth century!'
This state was the product, he continues, of 'a most elaborate system
of buying and selling, which has been called the World-Market; and
that World-Market, once set a-going, forced them to go on making more
and more of these wares, whether they needed them or not.' The
result was, of course, that the system became master of the work, and
the work itself ceased to have any significance, and 'under this
horrible burden of unnecessary production it became impossible for
them to look upon labour and its results from any other point of view
than one--to wit, the ceaseless endeavour to expend the least
possible amount of labour on any made, and yet at the same time to
make as many articles as possible.' Anybody who has had the smallest
experience of commerce knows that this is precisely the vicious
circle into which we have been caught. And with this Morris sets out
clearly the fact that the support of this state is to the interest
solely of the men who have the power to control labour and not that
of the labour itself, but that the workers have on the one hand, as
he says in the passage quoted from _A Dream of John Ball_, a hope
that they too may become masters and tyrannize in turn, and, on the
other hand, the long habit of drawing wages from these controllers
has imbued them with a dull belief that they are in reality dependent
not on their own work but upon some indefinable source of wealth set
up above them. Then, again, this system of class privilege has
behind it the power of a government that, though mainly ineffective
in itself, yet controls a further system of right by might--the Law
Courts and police and military, all of which things, with a fine show
of judicial balance, can be and are employed not to develop society
but to uphold establishments, the chief of which is this very
privilege and inequality. So that by an elaborate structure of
oppression which is necessary to the maintenance of the position of
the few, the people are quite effectually prevented from bringing any
spiritual discipline into their work, and are so deprived of the most
abiding happiness that life has to offer. That briefly is the
central significance of Morris's social proposition. The practical
means of deliverance is a matter upon which no two people are likely
to agree, and the method suggested by Morris need not be discussed,
because it does not really affect the general question. But it
cannot well be denied that his view of the evil is a sound one, and
that deliverance in one way or another is a possibility by which
alone contemplation of the evil is made tolerable.
The constructive aspect of the book not only shows the life for which
Morris hoped, but answers many of the objections made by reaction to
socialism in any shape. 'I have been told,' says the stranger, 'that
political strife was a necessary result of human nature.'
'Human nature!' cried the old boy impetuously; 'what human
nature?' The human nature of paupers, of slaves, of
slave-holders, or the human nature of wealthy freemen? Which?
Come, tell me that!