LITERATURE OF THE SOCIALIST PERIOD.
Despite the large amount of time and comparatively unproductive thought
given by Morris to his Socialism, the period of his greatest activity in
this direction was not without result in the field of pure literature. The
years from 1884 to 1890 were crowded with pamphlets, leaflets, newspaper
articles, manifestoes, and treatises, all with the one object--the making
of Socialists. Many of these were more or less works of art--but of art in
fetters; in the main they bore sad witness to the havoc made in the
aesthetic life of their author by his propagandising policy, and in their
deadly dulness betrayed the unwillingness of his mind to labour in a field
so foreign to it. Not even the overwhelming tasks imposed upon him
sufficed, however, to subdue entirely his restless imagination. From time
to time in the arid desert of his writings for "the cause" a poem of
romance appeared of a quality to show that the sap still ran in the
products of his mind. Between the first issue of _The Commonweal_ and the
inauguration of the Kelmscott Press he wrote in the following order: _The
Pilgrims of Hope_, _A Dream of John Ball_, _The House of the Wolfings_,
_The Roots of the Mountains_, and _News from Nowhere_.
Each is interesting as throwing a varied yet steady light upon his mental
processes, and the first is especially interesting despite its conspicuous
defects, as one of the very few examples of its author's style when
treating a subject belonging to the actual present, not to the past or
future. In it the reader leaves dreamland and is confronted by modern
problems and situations set forth in plain modern English. A garden is no
longer a garth, a dwelling-place is no longer a stead, the writer no
longer wots and meseems. So violent a change in vocabulary could hardly be
accomplished with entire success; at all events it was not, and much of
the phraseology is an affliction to the ear, showing a peculiarly
deficient taste in the use of a style uninspired by mediaeval tradition.
Yet, withal, _The Pilgrims of Hope_ is touched with life, as many of
Morris's more artful compositions are not. The old bottles will not always
serve for the new wine, Lowell warns us, and there is a noticeably
quickening element in this wine poured from the bottle of the day. It is
mentioned in Mr. Mackail's biography that Morris once began to write a
modern novel, but left it unfinished. The fabric of _The Pilgrims of Hope_
is that of a modern novel, and the characters and incidents are such as
Morris might easily have found in his daily path. A country couple leading
a life of peaceful simplicity go down to London, and among the sordid
influences of the town become converts to Socialism. Much that follows may
be considered a record of Morris's personal experience. The husband in the
poem tries, as Morris tried, to learn the grounds of the Socialist faith,
and takes up, as he did, the burden of spreading it among an indifferent
people. The following description might very well have been culled from
the diary kept by Morris during a part of his period of militant
Socialism, but it must be confessed that the balance of poetic charm is
all in favour of the account in the diary.
I read day after day
Whatever books I could handle, and heard about and about
What talk was going amongst them; and I burned up doubt after doubt,
Until it befell at last that to others I needs must speak
(Indeed, they pressed me to that while yet I was weaker than weak).
So I began the business, and in street-corners I spake
To knots of men. Indeed, that made my very heart ache,
So hopeless it seemed, for some stood by like men of wood.
And some, though fain to listen, but a few words understood;
And some but hooted and jeered: but whiles across some I came
Who were keen and eager to hear; as in dry flax the flame
So the quick thought flickered amongst them: and that indeed was a
feast.
So about the streets I went, and the work on my hands increased;
And to say the very truth, betwixt the smooth and the rough
It was work, and hope went with it, and I liked it well enough.
A similar passage, also showing the style at its worst, renders the actual
scene encountered by Morris at many a lecture, and contains a careful
portrait of himself as he appeared in his own eyes on such occasions. For
the sake of its accuracy its touch of self-consciousness may well be
forgiven. Not a conceited man, and curiously averse to mirrors, Morris was
not in the habit of using their psychological counterparts, and it is
impossible to surprise him in the act of posing to himself in becoming
attitudes. There is, therefore, no irritation to the mind in his
occasional frank assumption of interest in himself as a feature of the
landscape, so to speak. Here he is on the Socialist platform as the
Pilgrim of Hope beholds him, the Pilgrim explaining how it happened that
he got upon his track.
This is how it befell: a workman of mine had heard
Some bitter speech in my mouth, and he took me up at the word,
And said: "Come over to-morrow to our Radical spouting-place;
For there, if we hear nothing new, at least we shall see a new face;
He is one of those Communist chaps, and 'tis like that you two may
agree."
So we went, and the street was as dull and as common as aught you
could see.
Dull and dirty the room. Just over the chairman's chair
Was a bust, a Quaker's face with nose cocked up in the air.
There were common prints on the walls of the heads of the party fray,
And Mazzini dark and lean amidst them gone astray.
Some thirty men we were of the kind that I knew full well,
Listless, rubbed down to the type of our easy-going hell.
My heart sank down as I entered, and wearily there I sat
While the chairman strove to end his maunder of this and that.
And partly shy he seemed, and partly indeed ashamed
Of the grizzled man beside him as his name to us he named;
He rose, thickset and short, and dressed in shabby blue,
And even as he began it seemed as though I knew
The thing he was going to say, though I never heard it before.
He spoke, were it well, were it ill, as though a message he bore.
A word that he could not refrain from many a million of men.
Nor aught seemed the sordid room and the few that were listening then
Save the hall of the labouring earth and the world which was to be,
Bitter to many the message, but sweet indeed unto me,
And every soul rejoicing in the sweet and bitter of life:
Of peace and good-will he told, and I knew that in faith he spake,
But his words were my very thoughts, and I saw the battle awake,
And I followed from end to end! and triumph grew in my heart
As he called on each that heard him to arise and play his part
In the tale of the new-told gospel, lest as slaves they should live and
die.
He ceased, and I thought the hearers would rise up with one cry,
And bid him straight enroll them; but they, they applauded indeed,
For the man was grown full eager, and had made them hearken and heed.
But they sat and made no sign, and two of the glibber kind
Stood up to jeer and to carp his fiery words to blind.
I did not listen to them, but failed not his voice to hear
When he rose to answer the carpers, striving to make more clear
That which was clear already; not overwell, I knew
He answered the sneers and the silence, so hot and eager he grew;
But my hope full well he answered, and when he called again
On men to band together lest they live and die in vain,
In fear lest he should escape me, I rose ere the meeting was done,
And gave him my name and my faith--and I was the only one.
He smiled as he heard the jeers, and there was a shake of the hand,
He spoke like a friend long known; and lo! I was one of the band.
There is nothing impressive in such rhyming save its message, the form
costing little trouble and awakening little interest. Here, obviously,
Morris, like Dante, would rather his readers should find his doctrine
sweet than his verses. Parts of the poem are, however, upon a much higher
plane of accomplishment. The first section, called _The Message of the
March Wind_, contains exquisite images and moves to a fresh elastic
measure; a world both real and lovely being evoked by the opening stanzas:
Fair now is the springtide, now earth lies beholding
With the eyes of a lover the face of the sun;
Long lasteth the daylight, and hope is enfolding
The green-growing acres with increase begun.
Now sweet, sweet it is through the land to be straying
'Mid the birds and the blossoms and the beasts of the fields;
Love mingles with love and no evil is weighing
On thy heart or mine, where all sorrow is healed.
From township to township, o'er down and by tillage
Fair, far have we wandered and long was the day,
But now cometh eve at the end of the village,
Where o'er the grey wall the church riseth grey.
There is wind in the twilight; in the white road before us
The straw from the ox-yard is blowing about;
The moon's rim is rising, a star glitters o'er us,
And the vane on the spire-top is swinging in doubt.
Down there dips the highway, toward the bridge crossing over
The brook that runs on to the Thames and the sea.
Draw closer, my sweet, we are lover and lover;
This eve art thou given to gladness and me.
In the course of the poem the Pilgrims are called to Paris by the voice of
the Revolution, and there the wife is killed. Interwoven with the main
incidents is the domestic tragedy most familiar to fiction, the alienation
of the wife's affections by one of the husband's friends. Morris in his
treatment of this situation shows a peculiarly fine and tender quality,
sufficiently rare in life itself and seldom to be found in pictures of
life. He preserves the dignity of his unhappy characters by a delicate
sincerity in their attitude toward one another and by an immeasurable
gentleness and self-forgetfulness on the part of the one most wronged. A
similar situation in _News from Nowhere_ is made trivial and consequently
revolting by the impression it gives that it was created to illustrate a
theory. In no place does _The Pilgrims of Hope_ give such an impression.
It is a drawing from life, clumsy and summary enough in outline, yet
firm and expressive of the thing seen, and with power to convey a genuine
emotion.
[Illustration: _Portrait of Mrs. Morris_
_By Rossetti_]
_The Pilgrims of Hope_ appeared serially in _The Commonweal_ during
1885-1886. It was soon followed by a romance called _The Dream of John
Ball_. This subject with its mediaeval setting suited Morris well, and was
treated by him in his ripest and strongest vein. Although the story opens
in a lightly facetious manner, never a particularly happy one with him,
its tone as it proceeds is that of subdued and stately pathos. The writer
dreams himself in a village of Kent, where men are hanging upon the words
of that poor tutor of Oxford, the "Mad Priest," preaching the equality of
gentle and villein on the text
When Adam dalf, and Eve span
Who was thanne a gentilman?
Apparently the dream is the result of a mournfully retrospective mood. The
dreamer hears the plain and stirring speech of John Ball, listens to his
eager appeal to the men of Kent that they help their brethren of Essex
cast off the yoke placed upon them by bailiff and lord, and to his
prophecies that in the days to come, when they are free from masters, "man
shall help man, and the saints in heaven shall be glad, because men no
more fear each other ... and fellowship shall be established in heaven and
on the earth." But knowledge of the later time penetrates the dream, and
the dreamer ponders "how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing
that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it
comes it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight
for what they meant under another name." At this time Morris was realising
in some bitterness of heart that the thing for which he had fought was
turning out to be not what he had meant, and the talk between John Ball
and the dreamer concerning the future, of which the latter can reveal the
secret, is eloquent of sober and noble resignation. The reformer of the
earlier age receives with serenity the assurance that his sacrifice will
count only as failure in the eyes of the coming generations, since with it
goes the further assurance that men will continue to seek a remedy for
their wrongs. But we read in the conception the author's foreboding that
his own efforts toward the reconstitution of society are also doomed. The
dreamer meditates, with an insight born of personal experience and
disappointment, upon the darkness of our vision and the difficulty of
directing our steps toward our actual goal. Morris obviously traced in
John Ball's action a parallel to his own. What happened to the one was
what might happen to the other. The hope that inspired the one was the
same as inspired the other. The mistakes of the one were akin to the
mistakes of the other. Thus, this prose romance, of all that Morris wrote,
is warmest and most personal. The historical setting is an aid, not an
obstacle, to the imagination. The pathos of the real life touched upon,
the knowledge that the hopeful spirit of the preacher was once alive in
the land, and that the response of the men of Kent was given in truth and
with the might of angry, living hearts, lends a certain solidity and
vitality to the figures and inspires Morris to a sturdier treatment of his
material than legends could force from him. Had some of the marvellous
activity that later went toward the making of purely imaginary situations
and characters been spent upon realising for us the individual lives of
more of the mediaeval workers and thinkers, so vivid to Morris and so dim
to most of us, the result might not have been history, but it would have
been literature of a rare and felicitous type.
In April, 1888, _The Dream of John Ball_ was reprinted from _The
Commonweal_ in one volume, together with a short story based on the life
of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, and called _A King's Lesson_. This
also had appeared in _The Commonweal_ under the title of "An Old Story
Retold."
Hard upon this little volume followed _The House of the Wolfings_, a
war-story of the early Middle Ages, and significant as forming, with its
immediate successor, a link between old interests and new, marking its
author's return to the writing of pure romance, and also his first
awakening to an active interest in the typography of his books. The
subject is derived from the ancient literature, half myth, half history,
in which he had long been steeped, but in its treatment lurks a suggestion
of the great moral excitement of the Socialist campaign. Thiodulf, the
hero, beloved by a goddess, is the war-duke of a Gothic host and, on the
verge of battle with Roman legionaries, is deceived into wearing a hauberk
wrought by the dwarfs, the peculiar quality of which lies in its power to
preserve the wearer's life at the cost of defeat for his army. Learning of
this, Thiodulf removes the magic armour in time to gain his victory, but
in the moment of triumph he is killed. His exaltation of mood in thus
renouncing life suggests a spiritual ambition different from that commonly
associated with the gods and heroes of the early world, and conveys the
message by which Morris was at once burdened and inspired: that individual
life may cheerfully be sacrificed if the life of the many is saved or
elevated thereby. How far a war-duke of the Goths would have felt the
compensatory sense that he was gaining immortality through the effect of
his deeds on the destiny of his people was probably not in his mind. He
himself, despite his constitutional horror of death, would perhaps not
have been sorry at this time to lay off his hauberk if he could have been
certain of the victory. Throughout the history of Thiodulf runs an
elevated ethical intention absent from Morris's later romances. The
dignity and seriousness of the women, the nobility of the men, the social
unity of the Marksmen, and the high standard of thought and action
maintained by them as a community place the interest on a high plane. The
shadow of an idealised Socialism intensifies the relations of the
characters to one another, and the reader familiar with the course of the
author's life interprets the narrative as an expression of personal
feeling and moral conviction not without pathos in its contrast to the
actual world in which Morris was moving and in which he found what he
conceived to be his duty so repugnant to his tastes.
Indirectly the book was to open the way for his escape by filling his mind
with an enthusiasm along the natural line of his gifts, a zest for further
accomplishment in the field he loved that was not to be withstood. It was
printed at the Chiswick Press, and owing to a new interest in fine
printing due to his intercourse with Mr. Emery Walker, Morris chose for it
a quaint and little-known fount of type cut by Howard half a century
before, and gave much attention to the details of its appearance. With all
his familiarity with mediaeval books, and his delight in illustration and
illumination, he was still ignorant of the art of spacing and type
designing. He had characteristically concentrated his attention on the
special feature in which he was interested,--in the case of the old books,
the woodcuts and ornaments,--and had passed over even the most marked
characteristics which later were to absorb his whole attention. An
anecdote told by Mr. Buxton Forman shows the extent to which he
subordinated all other questions to the now supreme problem of a handsome
page, and also the adaptability of his mind, never at a loss to meet an
emergency. Mr. Forman had run across him at the Chiswick Press, whither
he had repaired to settle some final points concerning his title-page.
Presently down came the proof of the page. "It did not read quite as now,"
says Mr. Forman; "the difference, I think, was in the fourth and fifth
lines where the words stood 'written in prose and verse by William
Morris.' Now unhappily the words and the type did not so accord as to come
up to Morris's standard of decorativeness. The line wanted tightening up;
there was a three-cornered consultation between the Author, the Manager,
and myself. The word _in_ was to be inserted--'written in prose and in
verse'--to gain the necessary fulness of line. I mildly protested that the
former reading was the better sense and that it should not be sacrificed
to avoid a slight excess of white that no one would notice. 'Ha!' said
Morris, 'now what would you say if I told you that the verses on the
title-page were written just to fill up the great white lower half? Well,
that was what happened!'" The verses thus produced to fill a purely
decorative need were the following, as delicate and filled with tender
sentiment as any written by Morris under the most genuine inspiration--if
one may assume that any inspiration was more genuine with him than the
spur of a problem in decoration:
Whiles in the early winter eve
We pass amid the gathering night
Some homestead that we had to leave
Years past; and see its candles bright
Shine in the room beside the door
Where we were merry years agone
But now must never enter more,
As still the dark road drives us on.
E'en so the world of men may turn
At even of some hurried day
And see the ancient glimmer burn
Across the waste that hath no way;
Then with that faint light in its eyes
Awhile I bid it linger near
And nurse in wavering memories
The bitter-sweet of days that were.
In glee over the fine appearance of _The House of the Wolfings_ as it came
from the press, Morris passed on to his next book, _The Roots of the
Mountains_, also a romance suggesting the saga literature, but without the
mythological element. The setting hints at history without belonging to
any especial time or place. The plan is quite complicated in incident, and
the love-story involved has a modern tinge. Gold-mane, a chieftain of
Burgdale, is betrothed to a damsel somewhat prematurely named the Bride.
By a magic spell he is drawn through the woods to the Shadowy Vale where
he meets a daughter of the Kindred of the Wolf, called Sunbeam, with whom
he falls in love. It is a touch characteristic of Morris that makes
Gold-mane in describing his old love to the new loyally give the former
all the credit of her charm. "Each day she groweth fairer," he says to the
maiden who is already her rival in his affections; "there is no man's son
and no daughter of woman that does not love her; yea, the very beasts of
field and fold love her." Presently an alliance is formed between the men
of Burgdale and the Kindred of the Wolf for the purpose of attacking their
common enemy, the Dusky Men, who belong to a race of Huns. Attached to the
allied forces is a band of Amazons, and the two brave ladies, the Sunbeam
and the Bride, show themselves valorous in battle. The attack on the Dusky
Men is victorious, and peace returns to the valleys. In the meantime
Gold-mane has firmly, though with gentle words, told the Bride of his
intention of breaking his pledge to her, and the Sunbeam's brother,
Folkmight, has been moved by compassion and finally by love for the
deserted maiden, who consents to be his wife. It is quite in accord with
the ideal established by Morris in his works of fiction, as indeed in his
life, that sincerity takes the leading place among the virtues of his
characters. It requires a certain defiance of the conventional modern mood
to tolerate Gold-mane, the deserter, as he deals out cold comfort to the
Bride, yet the downright frankness of all these people is a quality so
native to their author as to pierce their unreality and give them the
touch of nature without which they would be made wholly of dreams.
_The Roots of the Mountains_ was written rapidly and issued with unrelaxed
attention to typographical problems. Its title-page was made even more
satisfactory than that of its predecessor, and the device of introducing a
little poem to fill up the ugly white space in the centre was again
employed. The lines in this case have nothing to do with the contents of
the book, though forced into a relation with the author's purpose of
providing "rest" for the reader. They were, in fact, founded upon an
incident of a railway trip when the train passed through meadows in which
hay-making was going on. Mr. Emery Walker was with Morris, and as they saw
the hay-cocks defrauded by the summer breeze he exclaimed, "A subject for
your title-page!" "Aye," said Morris, and jotted it down in his manuscript
book.
_The Roots of the Mountains_ was a favourite with Morris, and he planned
for it an edition on Whatman paper and bound in two patterns of Morris and
Company's chintz. Some of the paper ordered for this edition was left
over, and eventually was used by Morris for the first little post-quarto
catalogues and prospectuses printed at Hammersmith. Thus the book formed a
material link between the Chiswick Press and the Kelmscott Press.
Before the establishment of the latter, however, Morris gave one more book
to Socialism. His _News from Nowhere_ was the last of his works to appear
in _The Commonweal_ and was almost immediately reprinted from its pages by
an American publisher. It is an account of the civilised world as it might
be made, according to Morris's belief, by the application of his
principles of Socialism to life in general and in particular. In 1889 he
had reviewed for _The Commonweal_ Mr. Bellamy's _Looking Backward_, with
how much approbation may readily be imagined. As an expression of the
temperament of its author he considered it interesting, but as a
reconstructive theory unsafe and misleading. "I believe," he said, "that
the ideal of the future does not point to the lessening of man's energy by
the reduction of _labour_ to a minimum, but rather to the reduction of
_pain in labour_ to a minimum so small that it will cease to be pain; a
gain to humanity which can only be dreamed of till men are more completely
equal than Mr. Bellamy's Utopia would allow them to be, but which will
most assuredly come about when men are really equal in condition; although
it is probable that much of our so-called 'refinement,' our luxury,--in
short, our civilisation,--will have to be sacrificed to it." Early in 1890
appeared the first instalment of _News from Nowhere_, in which Morris set
himself the task of correcting the impression produced by Mr. Bellamy's
views of the future by substituting his own picture of a reconstructed
society, from which all the machinery that in _Looking Backward_ was
brought to so high a degree of efficiency is banished, and the natural
energies of man are employed to his complete satisfaction. Homer's
_Odyssey_, which Morris at this time was translating by way of refreshment
and amusement, may well have served as a partial inspiration for the
brilliant, delicate descriptions of handicrafts practised by the
art-loving people of Nowhere. We read in both of lovely embroideries; of
fine woven stuffs, soft and pliant in texture, and deeply dyed in rich
forgotten colours of antiquity; of the quaint elaboration and charm of
metals wrought into intricate designs; of all beautiful ornament to be
gained from the zeal of skilled and sensitive fingers. The image is before
us in _News from Nowhere_ of a life as busy and as bright as that of the
ancient Greeks, whose cunning hands could do everything save divide use
from beauty. As a natural consequence of happy labour, the inhabitants of
Nowhere have also the superb health and personal beauty of the Greeks.
Their women of forty and fifty have smooth skins and fresh colour, bright
eyes and a free walk. Their men have no knowledge of wrinkles and grey
hairs. Everywhere is the freshness and sparkle of the morning. The
pleasant homes nestle in peaceful security among the lavish fruits of the
earth. The water of the Thames flows clean and clear between its banks;
the fragrance of flowers pervades the pages and suggests a perpetual
summer; athletic sports are mingled with athletic occupations. There is
little studying. History is sad and often shameful--why then study it?
Knowledge of geography is not important; it comes to those who care to
travel. Languages one naturally picks up from intercourse with the people
of other countries. Political economy? When one practises good fellowship
what need of theories? Mathematics? They would wrinkle the brow; moreover,
one learns all that is necessary of them by building houses and bridges
and putting things together in the right way. It is not surprising that
in this buoyant life filled with active interests, the religion of which
is good-will and mutual helpfulness, the thought of death is not a welcome
one. A dweller in Nowhere admits that in the autumn he almost believes in
death; but no one entertains such a belief longer than he must. Thus we
get in this fair idyll the purely visible side of the society depicted.
The depths of the human heart and of the human soul are left unsounded. To
have what they desire, what is claimed by their hands, by their eyes, by
their senses, is the aim of the people. Renunciation, like mathematics,
would wrinkle the brow. Arbitrary restraint is not to be considered.
Nothing is binding, neither marriage vow nor labour contract, or, to speak
more precisely, neither marriage vow nor contract for labour exists. The
people live, as we are told, as some of the so-called savages in the South
Seas really do live,--in a state of interdependence so perfect that if an
individual lays down an obligation the community takes it up. For the
fading of life, for the death that may not delay till autumn to thrust
itself upon the attention, for the development of spiritual strength to
meet an enemy against whom art and beauty will not avail, for the battle
with those temptations of the flesh that are not averted by health and
comeliness, no provision is made. The author's philosophy is that work,
under pleasant conditions will do away with all the evils of both soul and
body.
As a document for active Socialists _News from Nowhere_ is not effective.
Absolutely without any basis of economic generalisation, it is merely the
fabric of a vision. At the time of writing it Morris was cutting the last
threads that bound him to conventional Socialist bodies. He was making
ready to live again, so far as modernity would let him, the life he loved.
"No work that cannot be done with pleasure in the doing is worth doing,"
was a maxim counted by him of the first importance, and assuredly he had
not found pleasure in the management of Socialist organisations. His last
Socialist book rings with the joy of his release. On its title-page it
appears as _Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance_, and it is interesting
to see how he regarded the original _Utopia_, to Ralph Robinson's
translation of which he wrote a preface, issuing it from his own press in
1893. His interpretation of Sir Thomas More's attitude is not the
conventional one, and is inspired chiefly by his own attitude toward the
great social question which he continued to ponder, insisting still upon
his hope for a new earth.
"Ralph Robinson's translation of More's _Utopia_," he says, "would not
need any foreword if it were to be looked upon merely as a beautiful book
embodying the curious fancies of a great writer and thinker of the period
of the Renaissance. No doubt till within the last few years it has been
considered by the moderns as nothing more serious than a charming literary
exercise, spiced with the interest given to it by the allusions to the
history of the time, and by our knowledge of the career of its author. But
the change of ideas concerning 'the best state of a publique weale,' which
I will venture to say is the great event of the end of this century, has
thrown a fresh light upon the book; so that now to some it seems not so
much a regret for days which might have been, as (in its essence) a
prediction of a state of society which will be. In short this work of the
scholar and Catholic, of the man who resisted what has seemed to most the
progressive movement of his own time, has in our days become a Socialist
tract familiar to the meetings and debating rooms of the political party
which was but lately like 'the cloud as big as a man's hand.' Doubtless
the _Utopia_ is a necessary part of a Socialist's library; yet it seems to
me that its value as a book for the study of sociology is rather historic
than prophetic, and that we Socialists should look upon it as a link
between the surviving Communism of the Middle Ages (become hopeless in
More's time, and doomed to be soon wholly effaced by the advancing wave of
Commercial Bureaucracy), and the hopeful and practical progressive
movement of to-day. In fact I think More must be looked upon rather as the
last of the old than the first of the new.
"Apart from what was yet alive in him of mediaeval Communist tradition, the
spirit of association, which amongst other things produced the Gilds, and
which was strong in the mediaeval Catholic Church itself, other influences
were at work to make him take up his parable against the new spirit of his
age. The action of the period of transition from mediaeval to commercial
society, with all its brutalities, was before his eyes; and though he was
not alone in his time in condemning the injustice and cruelty of the
revolution which destroyed the peasant life of England and turned it into
a grazing farm for the moneyed gentry; creating withal at one stroke the
propertyless wage-earner and the masterless vagrant (hodie 'pauper'), yet
he saw deeper into its root-causes than many other men of his own day, and
left us little to add to his views on this point except a reasonable hope
that those 'causes' will yield to a better form of society before long.
"Moreover the spirit of the Renaissance, itself the intellectual side of
the very movement which he strove against, was strong in him, and
doubtless helped to create his Utopia by means of the contrast which it
put before his eyes of the ideal free nations of the ancients, and the
sordid welter of the struggle for power in the days of dying feudalism, of
which he himself was a witness. This Renaissance enthusiasm has supplanted
in him the chivalry feeling of the age just passing away. To him war is no
longer a delight of the well-born, but rather an ugly necessity to be
carried on, if so it must be, by ugly means. Hunting and hawking are no
longer the choice pleasures of knight and lady, but are jeered at by him
as foolish and unreasonable pieces of butchery; his pleasures are in the
main the reasonable ones of learning and music. With all this, his
imaginations of the past he must needs read into his ideal vision,
together with his own experiences of his time and people. Not only are
there bond slaves and a king, and priests almost adored, and cruel
punishments for the breach of marriage contract, in that happy island, but
there is throughout an atmosphere of asceticism which has a curiously
blended savour of Cato the Censor and a mediaeval monk.
"On the subject of war, on capital punishment, the responsibility to the
public of kings and other official personages, and such-like matters, More
speaks words that would not be out of place in the mouth of an
eighteenth-century Jacobin, and at first sight this seems rather to show
sympathy with what is now mere Whigism than with Communism; but it must be
remembered that opinions which have become (in words) the mere commonplace
of ordinary bourgeoise politicians were then looked on as a piece of
startlingly new and advanced thought, and do not put him on the same plane
with the mere radical life of the last generation.
[Illustration: _Study of Mrs. Morris_
_Made by Rossetti for pictures called "The Day Dream"_]
"In More, then, are met together the man naturally sympathetic with the
Communistic side of mediaeval society, the protestor against the ugly
brutality of the earliest period of commercialism, the enthusiast of the
Renaissance, ever looking toward his idealised ancient society as the type
and example of all really intelligent human life; the man tinged with
the asceticism at once of the classical philosopher and of the monk, an
asceticism, indeed, which he puts forward not so much as a duty but rather
as a kind of stern adornment of life. These are, we may say, the moods of
the man who created _Utopia_ for us; and all are tempered and harmonised
by a sensitive clearness and delicate beauty of style, which make the book
a living work of art.
"But lastly, we Socialists cannot forget that these qualities and
excellences meet to produce a steady expression of the longing for a
society of equality of condition; a society in which the individual man
can scarcely conceive of his existence apart from the commonwealth of
which he forms a portion. This, which is the essence of his book, is the
essence also of the struggle in which we are engaged. Though, doubtless,
it was the pressure of circumstances in his own days that made More what
he was, yet that pressure forced him to give us, not a vision of the
triumph of the new-born capitalistic society, the element in which lived
the new learning and the freedom of thought of his epoch, but a picture
(his own indeed, not ours) of the real New Birth which many men before him
had desired; and which now indeed we may well hope is drawing near to
realisation, though after such a long series of events which at the time
of their happening seemed to nullify his hopes completely."[1]
Morris's own hope was never completely nullified; nor was he ever
indifferent to the questions which for nearly a decade had absorbed his
energy. But there was to be little more writing for the sake of Socialism,
save as some public incident called out a public letter. What he had done
covered a wide field. Beside the works already mentioned he had
collaborated with Mr. E. Belfort Bax in a history of the growth and
outcome of Socialism, first published in the _Commonweal_ under the title
of _Socialism from the Root Up_, had written a series of poems called
_Chants for Socialists_, and a series of lectures for "the cause" later
published as _Signs of Change_, and had produced numerous short addresses
to be scattered abroad in the form of penny leaflets that must have been
typographical eyesores to him even before the rise of his enthusiasm for
typography of the finer sort. In addition his bibliographer has to take
into account any number of ephemeral contributions to the press and
"forewords" as he liked to call them, to the works of others, a feature
rarely present in his own books. In the spring of 1890 he wrote the
romance entitled, _The Story of the Glittering Plain_ for the _English
Illustrated Magazine_. When it was brought out in book form the following
year, it was printed at his own press.