Complete works of willia.., p.817
Complete Works of William Morris, page 817
“The educational process, therefore, the forming a rallying point for definite aims, is necessary to our success; but I must guard against misunderstanding. We must be no mere debating club, or philosophical society; we must take part in all really popular movements when we can make our own views on them unmistakably clear; that is a most important part of the education in organization.
“Education towards Revolution seems to me to express in three words what our policy should be; towards that New Birth of Society which we know must come, and which, therefore, we must strive to help forward so that it may come with as little confusion and suffering as may be.”
In issuing this manifesto Morris, while not taking any step that brought him nearer the other wing of the Socialist party, the Parliamentarians and opportunists with whom he had broken a year before, also cut himself definitely away from the more violent section of his own supporters, who were already beginning to class themselves as Anarchists. It became a question whether the midway course he had chosen would attract towards it the best men of both extremes, or whether, on the other hand, he and his following would find themselves a mere thinning remnant between two divergent and increasing camps.
To Burne-Jones, who had written to him after the riot of the 8th of February asking him not to do anything rash, he answered:
“Many thanks, my dear Ned, for your anxiety, but lay it aside for the present. I shall not shove myself into assemblies that are likely to turn into riots; and for the rest I don’t think that the Government will be such doited fools as to attack mere opinion. If they do, all liberal-minded persons will be on our side and they will be ignominiously beaten. At the worst as far as I am concerned it cannot come to much more than a mere joke of a Police-Court case; and that not till the summer. I think the present excitement (it is little more) will die out; or rather be flattened out into a sort of dull discontent favourable to our propaganda, but not likely to lead people into mere aimless rioting. So I am not a bit anxious about myself. My mind is quite made up as to my position; I daresay you would not agree with me as to my views on that matter, but you would have to admit that I was right, judging the thing from my starting point, namely that I am impelled to take action of some sort.
“I will talk of this matter when we meet: meantime, old chap, I send my best love to you for troubling about me.
“I wish I were not so damned old. If I were but twenty years younger! But then you know there would be the Female complication somewhere. Best as it is after all.”
“I have often thought,” he says in another letter of the same date, “that we should be overtaken by the course of events — overtaken unprepared I mean. It will happen again and again: and some of us will cut sorry figures in the confusion. I myself shall be glad when this ferment sinks down again. Things industrial are bad — I wish they would better: their doing so would not interfere with our propaganda, and would give us some chance of getting at working men with intelligence and some share of leisure. Yet if that will not come about, and the dominating classes will push revolution on us, let it be! the upshot must be good in the end. If you had only suffered as I have from the apathy of the English lower classes (woe’s me how low!) you would rejoice at their awakening, however ugly the forms it took. As to my capacity for leadership in this turmoil, believe me, I feel as humble as could be wished: yet after all it is my life, and the work of it, and I must do my best.”
The ferment sank down; and though his forecast of trouble with the police in summer was to be literally verified, he had soon resumed the regular routine of his work. “We had a very crowded meeting here on Sunday,” he writes to Mrs. Morris on the 3rd of April: “I am going to Croydon to-morrow. Murray is in town, come back to Graham’s sale: I saw him at Charing Cross the other day. I go to Dublin on Thursday evening. I see people are making a great fuss about Walker’s pictures: I don’t much sympathize, but the one that they have bought for the National Gallery is the best he did. Ned’s and Gabriel’s are to be sold to-day. Millais’s Vale of Rest fetched a long price: but at any rate ’tis worth a cartload of the wretched daubs he turns out now.”
“I came back from the Irishry all safe last night,” he resumes on the 15th; “but I am off to Leeds and Bradford on Saturday and shall not be back thence till Tuesday: after that, peace as far as travelling is concerned till the end of June. I had a good passage back, and did 50 lines of Homer on the boat. Dublin on the whole I rather like: there is a sort of cosy shabbiness about it which, joined to the clear air, is pleasant. The last meeting on the Tuesday evening was peaceful and even enthusiastic. The day I had spent up among the Wicklow mountains, and found it very beautiful. On whatever other points the Irishry are wild, they are quite cool, sensible, and determined on the Home Rule question. I met some very agreeable middle-classers there and had much talk — far too much in fact; I doubt if there is an iron pot in Dublin with a leg on it by this time.
“I was very glad to get home and am very loth to leave it I can tell you. However, the wine is drawn and must be drunk.”
The translation of the Odyssey to which this last letter alludes had been just begun; and its inception marks the point at which the extreme tension of the last three years began to relax. For as long a period to come he continued equally active and conscientious in the work of spreading Socialist doctrine, but creative work in art and letters began now to resume its normal place in his mind. The effect on his spirits and temper was soon obvious. In May, when the fortunes of the first Home Rule Bill were still swaying heavily in the balance, he could take note of the wild words that were flying in the air with a humorous side glance at the hardly wilder words of the extremists among his own colleagues. “Rebellion is getting quite fashionable now; I shall have to join the Quakers. I wonder if the Queen will order herself to be arrested after having hoisted the flag of rebellion on Buckingham Palace. I don’t think, mind you, that there is much else than brag about the Orangemen; I suppose it would end in a riot or two. But you really should read the St. James’s now and then; Hyndman at his wildest is nothing to it.”
Indeed he seems now and then to have found it necessary to brace himself up against a moderation that was stealing over him almost against his will. “I do not love contention; I even shrink from it with indifferent persons. Indeed I know that all my faults lie on the other side: love of ease, dreaminess, sloth, sloppy good-nature, are what I chiefly accuse myself of. All these would not have been hurt by my being a ‘moderate Socialist’; nor need I have forgone a good share of the satisfaction of vainglory: for in such a party I could easily have been a leader, nay, perhaps the leader, whereas amidst our rough work I can scarcely be a leader at all and certainly do not care to be. I say this because I feel that a very little self deception would have landed me among the moderates. But self-deception it would have been.”
That recovered sweetness of temper (which no one but himself would ever have thought of describing as sloppy good-nature, or good-nature of any kind but the simplest and soundest) is apparent in a series of his letters to his daughter during June.
June 2. “Such a knockabout day as I had on Monday! I saw in the Daily News that our men had been ‘run in’ at Stratford, and expected what followed; namely that as soon as I got home I had to go off to West Ham Police Court (which is the Lord knows where) and see about cash for paying their fines: for we foolishly let too many men be run in, so that though the fines were small, it came to £5 17s. in all. I am very busy lecturing all this week, and have plenty of regrets for the rest of Kelmscott and your dear company; but what will you? it is part of the day’s work.”
June 5. “Stories I have none to tell you: ’tis all meeting and lecture, lecture and meeting, with a little writing interspersed. It was Margaret’s birthday on Thursday when I went to the Grange I found. She is ever so old, 20 actually, just think, and she the baby of the lot! Both the Hammersmith and the Merton gardens are looking very nice now, though even the latter is commonplace compared with Kelmscott. A lady who came on Thursday sent us yesterday a lot of peonies, single ones of various kinds, very handsome: they are Chinese flowers and look just like the flowers on their embroideries.
“Your old Prooshian Blue (only ’tis indigo).”June 15. “There is a good deal to tell you about since I wrote last. Though I forget if I told you how I went to speak on the disputed place at Stratford on Saturday week. Well, I went there rather expecting the police to ‘run me in.’ In which case I should have been fined the following Monday after a wearisome morning. However the meeting was so orderly that they didn’t venture, perhaps all the more as two of the Radicals spoke also; the meeting also was somewhat short. Last Saturday however they did ‘run in’ Mowbray and fined him 20s. and costs yesterday, which seemed to me absurd; I mean to say that they let us alone and got him. We are not going to give it up however yet, but shall try to get the Radicals to go into it heartily, as really an ordinary meeting makes no obstruction at all. In any case I shall not go there on Saturday, because on the Monday after I am to go on the Scotch journey of which I told you, and shall be away for a week. As to my coming to see you, my darling, if I possibly can this week I will; though it will have to be but a short visit.
“As to other events, we had our Conference on Sunday; all day long it lasted; May and I getting home about 11.30 p.m. It was rather a weary job that Conference, and as I was not a delegate, I had not got to speak; though that was after all rather a blessing, as the main subject in dispute was the alteration of the Constitution — not of the British Empire, but of the League. However all went well; the alterers were defeated and bore their defeat with good temper; but I am very glad that there is a respite of a year before we can have another. Yesterday (Monday) we had our outing and I rather enjoyed it, though we did not distinguish ourselves by much organization in it, wandering about rather aimlessly: also the day was not brilliant, as in the afternoon there was a sort of cloudy drizzle on the hills: yet we escaped a good ducking. The place, Box Hill, is really beautiful, with a famous box-wood at the top: you and I must go there when you are back in London. We finished off in Dorking, not however at the Markis of Granby, but the Wheatsheaf, where we had tea, beer, singing and recitation. I regret to state that in the town generally we were taken for a detachment of the Salvation Army. In fact Dorking is a very quiet place, and I don’t suppose they have yet heard the word Socialist. I forgot to say by the way, that though I didn’t speak at Stratford on Saturday I did so at Hyde Park near the Marble Arch. I was quite nervous about it, I don’t know why: because when I was speaking at Stratford I was not nervous at all, though I expected the Police to attack us. At Hyde Park we had a very quiet and rather good audience, and sold four quires of Commonweal: and I spoke twice, the second time not at all nervously.
“As to the Bill, my dear, we expected it to be defeated, though not by so large a majority. The question now is what the country will say about it. Again I expect Gladstone will be beaten, though this time he ought not to be, as he is in the right. I thought his last manifesto (of yesterday) was good and straightforward: there will be all sorts of trouble if the Home Rule matter is not soon settled. I am rather enjoying myself to-day after the last two days’ excitement, in being quietly at home on a nice fine fresh day, though I am obliged to work very hard.”
June 23: Arbroath. “I am here all safe and well: not a bad sort of a town for Scotland: all stone built, and all the older houses roofed with stone slates, right on the sea: it is in fact Fairport of ‘The Antiquary.’ The remains of a very fine Abbey Church and buildings stand for St. Ruth, the Musselcraig is identified, and so forth. I slept a good deal on the road: woke as the train went out of Stirling and showed a very raw-boned town but a lovely country plain and mountains with Forth amidst it very lovely. Perth also blue-boned, but a most beautiful situation, especially down the water of Tay. I have been walking on the sea-shore not trying to remember Miss Isabella Wardour; and now want my dinner.”
Even the long-looked-for collision with the police over the matter of open-air meetings, when it came, came in the mildest and most good-humoured form. On Sunday morning the 18th of July, in accordance with advertised arrangement, Morris was addressing an outdoor meeting in a street off the Edgware Road. An Inspector of police appeared on the scene; the crowd groaned, but made way for him. He came up “mighty civil “ and told Morris to stop speaking: Morris refused; his name and address were taken, and the Inspector went away again. Morris was summoned two days afterwards at the Marylebone Police Court: the technical offence of obstructing the highway was, of course, indisputable, and he was fined a shilling and costs. This was his last encounter with authority in the cause of freedom of speech. Public interest in the matter had for the time died away. Since their experience in Limehouse the year before, the police had been acting more sensibly, and avoided purposeless friction. The public were getting a little tired of the meetings on waste grounds or at street corners, which they vaguely classed with those of the Salvation Army as probably well-meant but certainly foolish, and best treated with neglect. The Radical clubs, which had rallied to the cry of free speech the year before, now hung back, and very reasonably suggested that if there were to be any common action, the Socialists had better first make up their own differences, which had for long been no secret. Always eager for peace, Morris took on himself once more the task of approaching the Social Democratic Federation to try to patch up the quarrel.
The attempt at peacemaking proved quite futile. Morris found the leader of the other faction “stiff and stately, playing the big man, and complaining of being ill-treated by us, which was a Wolf and Lamb business.” Indeed most of the grievances, on whichever side the cause of offence first arose, seem now as they seemed to Morris then, “preposterously petty.” At Dod Street — so the leaders of the Social Democratic Federation insisted, and made this the front of the offence — there had been a distinct breach of faith as regards the order of speeches on the 27th of September the year before. Angry words had passed at the time about this, and the Council of the Socialist League had passed a resolution expressing its “pity for Mr. Hyndman’s tools.” The insult was never forgotten. Since then each party had roundly accused the other of trying to break up its local branches by open abuse and underground insinuations. “How can we make common cause,” they asked, “with people who are perpetually calling us all liars, rogues, intriguers? “ For Morris personally indeed his opponents expressed unaltered regard. To accuse him of intrigue would have been plainly preposterous in the most heated adversary: and little as they took a lesson by it, the simple goodness of his nature impressed itself on even the most jealous, the vainest, the most vindictive of the men whom he longed to call his comrades, and for whose faults and vices, so long as he believed they had the root of the matter somewhere in them, he had a patience that was all but inexhaustible.
“Well, I think I have done with that lot,” he writes when this last negotiation had broken down. “Why will people quarrel when they have a serious end in view? I went to Merton yesterday and worked very hard at my patterns and found it amusing. I have finished the 8th book of Homer and got into the 9th, Lotus Eaters, Cyclops, and so on. How jolly it would be to be in a little cottage in the deep country going on with that, and long walks interspersed — in the autumn country, which after all I love as much as the spring.”
CHAPTER XVII. THE ODYSSEY: JOHN BALL: TRAFALGAR SQUARE. 1886-1887
THE return to literature, which began early in 1886 with the translation of the Odyssey into English verse, was to some degree both the cause and the effect of a gradual change in Morris’ attitude towards active Socialism. For between three and four years he had forced himself, under the impulse of a great hope and the continuous sense of a primary duty, into a more contracted and perhaps a less effective life than was consonant with his real nature. His principles had changed little when he became a declared Socialist: they changed even less now: but the movement of things was lifting him slowly away from the path that had coincided with or deflected his own, and insensibly he began to swing back into his own orbit. He held as strongly as ever that Education towards Revolution was the end to be steadily pursued. But the terms Education and Revolution both began to shift and enlarge their meaning. As the strain of an excessive concentration on a single task relaxed, the joy of work returned in a fuller measure. “It is right and necessary “ — such was the claim he had made consistently from the first on behalf of human life— “that all men should have work of itself pleasant to do; nay more, work done without pleasure is, however one may turn it, not real work at all, but useless and degrading toil.” The educational, no less than the creative, work which he did in the latter years of life resumed this pleasurable quality, which for a time, under the compulsion of what seemed an overpowering duty, had been almost beaten out of it. In the strenuous self-devotion to the labours exacted of him by his party — sometimes distasteful to him in the highest degree, sometimes of a kind for which he had little native aptitude — there had been an element of what he himself felt to be unnatural. His energy had become forced and feverish. In his own beautiful words, it was the “power of the strong man yearning to accomplish something before his death, not the simple hope of the child who has long years of life and growth before him.” That simple hope is a thing which, once broken, can never be wholly restored. But in his work for the cause henceforth there was, in spite of all discouragements, the hope and the joy that come of work which looks to no immediate results, and is checked by no apparent failure, but sows the seed and leaves it to quicken: as if a man should cast seed into the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.
