'Now, this is what I want to ask you about, to wit, how you get
people to work when there is no reward of labour, and especially
how you get them to work strenuously?'
'No reward of labour?' said Hammond, gravely, 'the reward of
labour is life. Is that not enough?'
'But no reward for especially good work,' quoth I.
'Plenty of reward,' said he, 'the reward of creation. The wages
which God gets, as people might have said time agone. If you are
going to ask to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is
what excellence in work means, the next thing we shall hear of
will be a bill sent in for the begetting of children.'
'Well, but,' said I, 'the man of the nineteenth century would say
there is a natural desire toward the procreation of children, and
a natural desire not to work.'
'Yes, yes,' said he, 'I know the ancient platitude; wholly
untrue; indeed, to us quite meaningless.'
That is very simple, and yet it shows the profoundest insight into
the essential nature of humanity. Nothing is sadder or more
ludicrous than to hear people say that they turn to the degraded
sensationalism that passes for life in daily report because of their
interest in human nature. The enervating influence of this
perversion of life upon much of our finest artistic genius has been
mentioned. Morris was not much given to criticizing contemporary
literature in his writing, but he makes one of the people in his new
world say of certain books of the late nineteenth century--
'But I say flatly that in spite of all their cleverness and
vigour, and capacity for story telling, there is something
loathsome about them. Some of them, indeed, do here and there
show some feeling for those whom the history-books call 'poor,'
and of the misery of whose lives we have some inkling; but
presently they give it up, and towards the end of the story we
must be contented to see the hero and heroine living in an island
of bliss on other people's troubles; and that after a long series
of sham troubles (or mostly sham) of their own making,
illustrated by dreary introspective nonsense about their feelings
and aspirations, and all the rest of it.'
That was written before the new day of John Galsworthy and John
Masefield, and even then Morris would have been the first to make
many honourable exclusions from his charge. But the charge itself
was founded on deep understanding.
In the life to which the revolt against this sham life has led in
_News from Nowhere_ the radical change is, of course, that all this
misuse of work has been abolished. People no longer make unnecessary
things and so find time to make the necessary things well. And the
very act of doing this has brought a strange new exultation into
their lives, and once again human nature has come into its own
unbridled expression. They still have their troubles, their
love-quarrels, 'the folly which comes by nature, the unwisdom of the
immature man, or the older men caught in a trap,' the anxiety of the
mother as to her children--'they may indeed turn out better or worse;
they may disappoint her highest hopes; such anxieties as these are a
part of the mingled pleasure and pain which goes to make up the life
of mankind,'--but they are free of the cares of a time when the aim
of men's work was to come uppermost in competition and not to make
the work its own joy and reward. The men and women still have their
difficult sex problems to solve, but they do not complicate them by
wilful neglect of obvious facts; they recognize for instance that a
man or a woman may love quite genuinely and tire and even love again
as at first, and if a match does not turn out well, they break it and
shake off the grief 'in a way which perhaps the sentimentalists of
other times would think contemptible and unheroic, but which we think
necessary and manlike.' Their acceptance of these natural facts does
not mean that they live in a state of disorganized and capricious
relationship. Faithful love is a common enough condition among them,
but they are not unwise enough to suppose that when it is not present
its place can be satisfactorily and wholesomely taken by an
artificial pretence. Finding this joy in the work of their hands,
and seeing no end to work other than that joy, they have lost all
jealousy of the work of their fellows, and every man is encouraged to
the best that is in him by common consent and approval. Infinite
variety has taken the place of monotony, and one man's pleasure in
another's achievement the place of fear that it may mean loss to
himself. Hammond can say--
We live amidst beauty without fear of becoming effeminate, ... we
have plenty to do, and on the whole enjoy doing it. What more
can we ask of life?
What indeed? It must be remembered that he says 'we.' The delight
is complete only because it is common to all.
'In time past, indeed, men were told to love their kind, to
believe in the religion of humanity and so forth. But look you,
just in the degree that a man had elevation of mind and
refinement enough to be able to value this idea was he repelled
by the obvious aspect of the individuals composing the mass which
he was to worship; and he could only evade that repulsion by
making a conventional abstraction of mankind that had little
actual or historical relation to the race, which to his eyes was
divided into blind tyrants on the one hand and apathetic degraded
slaves on the other. But now, where is the difficulty in
accepting the religion of humanity, when the men and women who go
to make up humanity are free, happy, and energetic at least, and
most commonly beautiful of body also, and surrounded by beautiful
things of their own fashioning, and a nature bettered and not
worsened by contact with mankind?'
That was Morris's clear conviction as to the whole question, and the
word that he uses to describe the new meaning of work--that is the
remedy of all the social evils against which he was in revolt--is art.
This, then, was the creed and the hope that Morris set out in detail
in _News from Nowhere_. That the dream was farther from realization
than he thought may be the unhappy truth, but of this at least we are
sure, that he dreamt a good thing. The picture that he shows us is
of healthy, aspiring, joyous men and women, full of sweet humour and
clean passion, who, far from having lost all incentive to endeavour,
have found a new and tremendous cause for endeavour in every hour of
the day. For them work and worship have become one, and of the union
has come life. The prose that Morris uses is beautiful because
perfectly adapted to its purpose. In the practical discussions on
particular questions the style is swift and incisive; in the
descriptions of the life of his new world it is coloured by all his
tenderness and love for men and natural beauty. 'The earth and the
growth and the life of it! If I could but say or show how I love
it!' It is a cry always ready upon his lips. And he brings to his
work here, too, a charming and whimsical humour. The little sketch
of that wonderful person the Golden Dustman is a master-stroke of
genuinely human comedy. And the humour may be leavened with
admirable satire; he has in his mind a certain day in Trafalgar
Square, when 'unarmed and peaceable people were attacked by ruffians
armed with bludgeons.' 'And they put up with that?' says Dick--
'We _had_ to put up with it; we couldn't help it.'
The old man looked at me keenly and said: 'You seem to know a
great deal about it, neighbour! And is it really true that
nothing came of it?'
'This came of it,' said I, 'that a good many people were sent to
prison because of it.'
'What, of the bludgeoners?' said the old man. 'Poor devils!'
'No, no,' said I, 'of the bludgeoned.'
Said the old man rather severely: 'Friend, I expect that you have
been reading some rotten collection of lies, and have been taken
in by it too easily.'
The book has been described, quite aptly, as insular. In its
atmosphere and colour it is essentially English. The accounts of a
reconstructed London and a cleansed countryside, of the great Thames
reaches and the stone buildings of the Cotswolds, of the happy and
generous but rather silent folk, of their traditions and customs and
their characteristics, are all written by an Englishman of Englishmen
and their country. Their natures have not been fundamentally
changed, but stripped of the excrescences of an effete and degraded
society, and they are still drawn in their proper relation to their
native landscape. They are the clearly wrought ideal of our race,
but they have left in them nothing of those products of our race who
consistently confuse expediency with ethical fitness, sentimentalism
with passion, and celebrate the planting of the British flag in all
sorts of places where it is not in the least wanted by calling
themselves God's Englishmen.