Part 9

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!

And then again--

'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.

VII

PROSE ROMANCES AND POEMS BY THE WAY

During the later years of his life, when he was distracted by the many claims of his active socialism and constantly harassed by details of organization and the efforts to reconcile people who, having the same interests, persisted in misunderstanding each other, Morris wrote a series of prose romances that hold a distinctive place in his art. His long poems show us a life conceived on lines that I have sought to trace, approached in a mood of austere responsibility and defined with all the completeness that he could bring to work. In these prose romances the life is unchanged, but it is seen through a different mood. It is as though he turned aside from the stress of his daily work to the world that his imagination had already created as the only sane one for men, and saw it with a kind of new leisureliness and wholesome irresponsibility. It was impossible for him to allow fancy to intrude upon the life that he desired to the exclusion of any of its vital qualities, but, as far as was possible without such offence to his artistic conscience, in these romances he indulged his faculty for story-telling without curb. The people and their adventures and characters are still, as in the poems, related continuously to Morris's radical conception of life, but they are no longer related to any central purpose contained in the work of art itself. The waywardness and profuseness of romanticism are here carried to their extreme limits, and yet we never feel that the narratives are formless, so powerful and fixed is the vision through which Morris draws them into unity. The justification of his indifference to the ordinary demands of construction in a book like _The Roots of the Mountains_, is that we do not feel that the work would gain in any way were he scrupulously careful in this matter. Morris had created a world in his imagination, just and beautiful as it seemed to him. From that world he drew the substance of his great poems, reducing it to the essential and symbolic terms of art. _Jason_ and _The Earthly Paradise_ and _Sigurd_ are all perfectly constructed results of the submission of this world to the severe process of artistic selection. But in the later prose romances we are led into the very world itself from which these things were drawn, and given leave to wander through it as we will. We find that it is cosmic as life is cosmic, but it is not yet wrought into the stricter proportions of art. If we can think of Morris writing through another generation, it is impossible to believe that he would have turned again, say, to the Volsung story; that he had shaped finally in _Sigurd the Volsung_; but we feel that he might have found material in these romances for poem after poem, that, indeed, they are, as it were, a panoramic expression of the world from which his poems must inevitably be imagined. There is in them nothing of inconsistency, but there is a prodigal diffuseness that belongs rather to nature than to art. They are the storehouse from which Morris's own art was drawn, and poets to come may yet turn to them as they do to Malory or as Morris himself did to the Sagas.

The choice of prose for these romances was, for this reason, not in any way arbitrary but the result of sound artistic deliberation. Where Morris used the same material and crystallized it through his finest imaginative impulse, verse was the natural and inevitable medium; but he is here showing us the material before it had been subjected to this highest creative energy, and there is not the spiritual fusion that makes verse necessary to complete expression. The prose that he uses is stamped always with his personality, and so justifies itself even where most open to criticism. It is commonly of extraordinary beauty, full of the gravity and high manners that belong to the heroic atmosphere of the stories themselves; and even where the adaptation of an archaic method of speech is most pronounced it is not self-conscious. All language is dependent largely on convention, and that Morris used a convention that was not generally accepted was a virtue in workmanship rather than a vice. The important thing is that he was consistent in the use, or, in other words, that his convention was never a mannerism but definitely a corporate part of his style.

These stories are but another instance of the remarkable range of Morris's artistic power. They do not, of course, rank with his own most splendid work, but in a particular kind of prose romance they attain an excellence that had not been known in England for several centuries. And in the ease with which they hold our interest in the story and at the same time maintain a perfect consistency of character, they show that, had he chosen, Morris might have added yet another to his many achievements, and challenged comparison with the best of Fielding's successors. The Bride and the Sunbeam, Face-of-God and Walter and Folk-Might, and, above all, Dallach, are drawn with that certainty and depth of understanding of the individual that are perhaps the chief distinction of the youngest of the literary arts in England.

In 1891 Morris's last book of poems, _Poems By The Way_, was published by the Kelmscott Press. In it the poet gathered together some fifty of his shorter poems written at intervals during the thirty years since the publication of _The Defence of Guenevere_, and there are naturally in the volume a wide range of subjects and much diversity of manner. Fragments from rejected or unfinished tales intended for _The Earthly Paradise_, fine echoes and memories of his Icelandic studies and travel, lyrical expressions of this mood or that, translations from the Flemish and Danish and his beloved saga-tongue, fairy tales, chants that grew out of his socialism, and a few poems that show that when he chose to apply his poetic vision to modern conditions he could do so with profound penetration, are brought together almost at haphazard. If, as Mr. Arthur Symons says, a pageant is a shining disorder, then this book is truly a pageant. And yet behind all these expressions of many times and moods is to be seen the central impulse of Morris's life knitting them together into a clear spiritual unity. It seems a far cry from the delicate tenderness of 'From the Upland to the Sea' to the passion of 'Mother and Son,' from the sombre brooding of 'To the Muse of the North' to the airy romance of 'Goldilocks and Goldilocks,' yet they are all unmistakably begotten of the same temperament. The high reverence for naked life, the insistence on labour being joyful if it was not to be abominable, the fierce worship of beauty and the courageous acceptance of its passing, these were the things by which Morris had his being, and they are woven into all the pages of his last book. He was a man who took literally no thought as to the relation of the work in hand to that of years passed. A story is told of him that when a friend who was helping him to collect the material for _Poems By The Way_ brought a poem to him he could not remember having written a line of it. The perfect consistency of his aim and temper from first to last is the more remarkable in consequence, and the kinship between two fragmentary expressions of his life, divided perhaps by thirty years, is fine to see. His understanding of the ideal towards which he strove became clearer as he passed through his strenuous existence, and his powers of realizing it in his art matured steadily to the end, but the ideal itself was unchanged. That in an artist is a splendid thing: a thing that perhaps of all others is the token of his divinity. For it is that central certainty of purpose that is immortal in him, austerely set above the change of circumstance. The form of his art may pass from its first imitative and awkward groping slowly to its perfection or it may prove itself at the beginning, but it is the great guiding purpose that he cannot gain by seeking, and that lends truth to the common phrase.