IX

I cannot remember who first brought me to the old stable beside

Kelmscott House, William Morris' house at Hammersmith, & to the

debates held there upon Sunday evenings by the socialist League. I

was soon of the little group who had supper with Morris

afterwards. I met at these suppers very constantly Walter Crane,

Emery Walker presently, in association with Cobden Sanderson, the

printer of many fine books, and less constantly Bernard Shaw and

Cockerell, now of the museum of Cambridge, and perhaps but once or

twice Hyndman the socialist and the anarchist Prince Krapotkin.

There too one always met certain more or less educated workmen,

rough of speech and manner, with a conviction to meet every turn.

I was told by one of them, on a night when I had done perhaps more

than my share of the talking, that I had talked more nonsense in

one evening than he had heard in the whole course of his past

life. I had merely preferred Parnell, then at the height of his

career, to Michael Davitt who had wrecked his Irish influence by

international politics. We sat round a long unpolished and

unpainted trestle table of new wood in a room where hung

Rossetti's 'Pomegranate,' a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and where one

wall and part of the ceiling were covered by a great Persian

carpet. Morris had said somewhere or other that carpets were meant

for people who took their shoes off when they entered a house, and

were most in place upon a tent floor. I was a little disappointed

in the house, for Morris was an old man content at last to gather

beautiful things rather than to arrange a beautiful house. I saw

the drawing-room once or twice and there alone all my sense of

decoration, founded upon the background of Rossetti's pictures,

was satisfied by a big cupboard painted with a scene from Chaucer

by Burne Jones, but even there were objects, perhaps a chair or a

little table, that seemed accidental, bought hurriedly perhaps,

and with little thought, to make wife or daughter comfortable. I

had read as a boy in books belonging to my father, the third

volume of 'The Earthly Paradise' and 'The Defence of Guinevere,'

which pleased me less, but had not opened either for a long time.

'The man who never laughed again' had seemed the most wonderful of

tales till my father had accused me of preferring Morris to Keats,

got angry about it and put me altogether out of countenance. He

had spoiled my pleasure, for now I questioned while I read and at

last ceased to read; nor had Morris written as yet those prose

romances that became, after his death, so great a joy that they

were the only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not

come too quickly to the end. It was now Morris himself that

stirred my interest, and I took to him first because of some

little tricks of speech and body that reminded me of my old

grandfather in Sligo, but soon discovered his spontaneity and joy

and made him my chief of men. To-day I do not set his poetry very

high, but for an odd altogether wonderful line, or thought; and

yet, if some angel offered me the choice, I would choose to live

his life, poetry and all, rather than my own or any other man's. A

reproduction of his portrait by Watts hangs over my mantlepiece

with Henley's, and those of other friends. Its grave wide-open

eyes, like the eyes of some dreaming beast, remind me of the open

eyes of Titian's' Ariosto,' while the broad vigorous body suggests

a mind that has no need of the intellect to remain sane, though it

give itself to every phantasy, the dreamer of the middle ages. It

is 'the fool of fairy ... wide and wild as a hill,' the resolute

European image that yet half remembers Buddha's motionless

meditation, and has no trait in common with the wavering, lean

image of hungry speculation, that cannot but fill the mind's eye

because of certain famous Hamlets of our stage. Shakespeare

himself foreshadowed a symbolic change, that shows a change in the

whole temperament of the world, for though he called his Hamlet

'fat, and scant of breath,' he thrust between his fingers agile

rapier and dagger.

The dream world of Morris was as much the antithesis of daily life

as with other men of genius, but he was never conscious of the

antithesis and so knew nothing of intellectual suffering. His

intellect, unexhausted by speculation or casuistry, was wholly at

the service of hand and eye, and whatever he pleased he did with

an unheard of ease and simplicity, and if style and vocabulary

were at times monotonous, he could not have made them otherwise

without ceasing to be himself. Instead of the language of Chaucer

and Shakespeare, its warp fresh from field and market, if the woof

were learned, his age offered him a speech, exhausted from

abstraction, that only returned to its full vitality when written

learnedly and slowly. The roots of his antithetical dream were

visible enough: a never idle man of great physical strength and

extremely irascible--did he not fling a badly baked plum pudding

through the window upon Xmas Day?--a man more joyous than any

intellectual man of our world, called himself 'the idle singer of

an empty day' created new forms of melancholy, and faint persons,

like the knights & ladies of Burne Jones, who are never, no, not

once in forty volumes, put out of temper. A blunderer, who had

said to the only unconverted man at a socialist picnic in Dublin,

to prove that equality came easy, 'I was brought up a gentleman

and now, as you can see, associate with all sorts,' and left

wounds thereby that rankled after twenty years, a man of whom I

have heard it said 'He is always afraid that he is doing something

wrong, and generally is,' wrote long stories with apparently no

other object than that his persons might show one another, through

situations of poignant difficulty, the most exquisite tact.

He did not project, like Henley or like Wilde, an image of

himself, because, having all his imagination set on making and

doing, he had little self-knowledge. He imagined instead new

conditions of making and doing; and, in the teeth of those

scientific generalisations that cowed my boyhood, I can see some

like imagining in every great change, believing that the first

flying fish leaped, not because it sought 'adaptation' to the air,

but out of horror of the sea.

X

Soon after I began to attend the lectures, a French class was

started in the old coach-house for certain young socialists who

planned a tour in France, and I joined it and was for a time a

model student constantly encouraged by the compliments of the old

French mistress. I told my father of the class, and he asked me to

get my sisters admitted. I made difficulties and put off speaking

of the matter, for I knew that the new and admirable self I was

making would turn, under family eyes, into plain rag doll. How

could I pretend to be industrious, and even carry dramatization to

the point of learning my lessons, when my sisters were there and

knew that I was nothing of the kind? But I had no argument I could

use and my sisters were admitted. They said nothing unkind, so far

as I can remember, but in a week or two I was my old procrastinating

idle self and had soon left the class altogether. My elder sister

stayed on and became an embroideress under Miss May Morris,

and the hangings round Morris's big bed at Kelmscott House,

Oxfordshire, with their verses about lying happily in bed when

'all birds sing in the town of the tree,' were from her needle

though not from her design. She worked for the first few months

at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and in my imagination I cannot

always separate what I saw and heard from her report, or indeed

from the report of that tribe or guild who looked up to Morris

as to some worshipped mediaeval king. He had no need for other

people. I doubt if their marriage or death made him sad or glad,

and yet no man I have known was so well loved; you saw him

producing everywhere organisation and beauty, seeming, almost in

the same instant, helpless and triumphant; and people loved him as

children are loved. People much in his neighbourhood became

gradually occupied with him, or about his affairs, and without any

wish on his part, as simple people become occupied with children.

I remember a man who was proud and pleased because he had

distracted Morris' thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the

conversation delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at

Swinburne. 'Oh, Swinburne,' said Morris, 'is a rhetorician; my

masters have been Keats and Chaucer for they make pictures.' 'Does

not Milton make pictures?' asked my informant. 'No,' was the

answer, 'Dante makes pictures, but Milton, though he had a great

earnest mind, expressed himself as a rhetorician.' 'Great earnest

mind,' sounded strange to me and I doubt not that were his

questioner not a simple man, Morris had been more violent. Another

day the same man started by praising Chaucer, but the gout was

worse and Morris cursed Chaucer for destroying the English

language with foreign words.

He had few detachable phrases and I can remember little of his

speech, which many thought the best of all good talk, except that

it matched his burly body and seemed within definite boundaries

inexhaustible in fact and expression. He alone of all the men I

have known seemed guided by some beast-like instinct and never ate

strange meat. 'Balzac! Balzac!' he said to me once, 'Oh, that was

the man the French bourgeoisie read so much a few years ago.' I

can remember him at supper praising wine: 'Why do people say it is

prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by the

sunlight and the sap?' and his dispraising houses decorated by

himself: 'Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a

house like a big barn, where one ate in one corner, cooked in

another corner, slept in the third corner & in the fourth received

one's friends'; and his complaining of Ruskin's objection to the

underground railway: 'If you must have a railway the best thing

you can do with it is to put it in a tube with a cork at each

end.' I remember too that when I asked what led up to his

movement, he replied, 'Oh, Ruskin and Carlyle, but somebody should

have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes.'

Though I remember little, I do not doubt that, had I continued

going there on Sunday evenings, I should have caught fire from his

words and turned my hand to some mediaeval work or other. Just

before I had ceased to go there I had sent my 'Wanderings of

Usheen' to his daughter, hoping of course that it might meet his

eyes, & soon after sending it I came upon him by chance in

Holborn. 'You write my sort of poetry,' he said and began to

praise me and to promise to send his praise to 'The Commonwealth,'

the League organ, and he would have said more of a certainty had

he not caught sight of a new ornamental cast-iron lamp-post and

got very heated upon that subject.

I did not read economics, having turned socialist because of

Morris's lectures and pamphlets, and I think it unlikely that Morris

himself could read economics. That old dogma of mine seemed germane

to the matter. If the men and women imagined by the poets were the

norm, and if Morris had, in, let us say, 'News from Nowhere,' then

running through 'The Commonwealth,' described such men and women

living under their natural conditions or as they would desire to

live, then those conditions themselves must be the norm, and could

we but get rid of certain institutions the world would turn from

eccentricity. Perhaps Morris himself justified himself in his own

heart by as simple an argument, and was, as the socialist D... said

to me one night walking home after some lecture, 'an anarchist

without knowing it.' Certainly I and all about me, including D...

himself, were for chopping up the old king for Medea's pot. Morris

had told us to have nothing to do with the parliamentary socialists,

represented for men in general by the Fabian Society and Hyndman's

Socialist Democratic Federation and for us in particular by D...

During the period of transition mistakes must be made, and the

discredit of these mistakes must be left to 'the bourgeoisie;' and

besides, when you begin to talk of this measure or that other you

lose sight of the goal and see, to reverse Swinburne's description

of Tiresias, 'light on the way but darkness on the goal.' By

mistakes Morris meant vexatious restrictions and compromises--'If

any man puts me into a labour squad, I will lie on my back and

kick.' That phrase very much expresses our idea of revolutionary

tactics: we all intended to lie upon our back and kick. D..., pale

and sedentary, did not dislike labour squads and we all hated him

with the left side of our heads, while admiring him immensely with

the right. He alone was invited to entertain Mrs. Morris, having

many tales of his Irish uncles, more especially of one particular

uncle who had tried to commit suicide by shutting his head into a

carpet bag. At that time he was an obscure man, known only for a

witty speaker at street corners and in Park demonstrations. He had,

with an assumed truculence and fury, cold logic, an universal

gentleness, an unruffled courtesy, and yet could never close a

speech without being denounced by a journeyman hatter with an

Italian name. Converted to socialism by D..., and to anarchism by

himself, with swinging arm and uplifted voice this man perhaps

exaggerated our scruple about parliament. 'I lack,' said D..., 'the

bump of reverence;' whereon the wild man shouted 'You 'ave a 'ole.'

There are moments when looking back I somewhat confuse my own figure

with that of the hatter, image of our hysteria, for I too became

violent with the violent solemnity of a religious devotee. I can

even remember sitting behind D... and saying some rude thing or

other over his shoulder. I don't remember why I gave it up but I did

quite suddenly; and I think the push may have come from a young

workman who was educating himself between Morris and Karl Marx. He

had planned a history of the navy and when I had spoken of the

battleship of Nelson's day, had said: 'Oh, that was the decadence of

the battleship,' but if his naval interests were mediaeval, his

ideas about religion were pure Karl Marx, and we were soon in

perpetual argument. Then gradually the attitude towards religion of

almost everybody but Morris, who avoided the subject altogether, got

upon my nerves, for I broke out after some lecture or other with all

the arrogance of raging youth. They attacked religion, I said, or

some such words, and yet there must be a change of heart and only

religion could make it. What was the use of talking about some near

revolution putting all things right, when the change must come, if

come it did, with astronomical slowness, like the cooling of the sun

or, it may have been, like the drying of the moon? Morris rang his

chairman's bell, but I was too angry to listen, and he had to ring

it a second time before I sat down. He said that night at supper:

'Of course I know there must be a change of heart, but it will not

come as slowly as all that. I rang my bell because you were not

being understood.' He did not show any vexation, but I never

returned after that night; and yet I did not always believe what I

had said and only gradually gave up thinking of and planning for

some near sudden change for the better.