Complete works of willia.., p.819
Complete Works of William Morris, page 819
“Sunday for same reason I did not speak out of doors. I went to Mitcham (the branch) on Sunday evening and spoke extemporary to them at their club-room, a tumble-down shed opposite the grand new workhouse built by the Holborn Union: amongst the woeful hovels that make up the worse (and newer) part of Mitcham, which was once a pretty place with its old street and greens and lavender fields. Except a German from Wimbledon (who was in the chair) and two others who looked like artisans of the painter or small builder type, the audience was all made up of labourers and their wives: they were very quiet and attentive except one man who was courageous from liquor, and interrupted sympathetically: but I doubt if most of them understood anything I said; though some few of them showed that they did by applauding the points. I wonder sometimes if people will remember in times to come to what a depth of degradation the ordinary English workman has been reduced; I felt very downcast amongst these poor people in their poor hutch whose opening I attended some three months back (and they were rather proud of it). There were but about 25 present: yet I felt as if I might be doing some good there. . . .
“Monday was Council-night again, and I attended. Poor Allman had been before the magistrate that day and fined 40s., and was sent to jail in default of payment: his offence was open-air preaching close to the meeting-place of the Hackney Branch: so we are beginning our troubles early this year; which is a great nuisance; but I don’t see what is to be done: we can’t give up street-preaching in spite of what Bax and one or two others say about its uselessness: yet the police if they persist can put us down; and unless we can get up a very good case of causeless interference on their part, and consequent presumption of unfairness against us, we shall not be able to enlist the Radical clubs on our side, which is our only chance. At the Council we agreed not to pay Allman’s fine, as he cried out loudly against it; and I believe meant it, as he is a courageous little man. . . . I may note here for the benefit of well-to-do West-enders that the police are incredibly rough and brutal to the poor people in the East end; and that they treated Allman very ill. . . . I may as well say here that my intention is if possible to prevent the quarrel coming to a head between the two sections, parliamentary and anti-parliamentary, which are pretty much commensurate with the Collectivists and Anarchists: and this because I believe there would be a good many who would join the Anarchist side who are not really Anarchists, and who would be useful to us: indeed I doubt if, except one or two Germans, etc., we have any real Anarchists amongst us: and I don’t want to see a lot of enthusiastic men who are not very deep in Socialist doctrines driven off for a fad of the more pedantic part of the Collectivist section. . . .
“Yesterday all day long with Bax trying to get our second article on Marx together: a very difficult job: I hope it may be worth the trouble.
“News of the German selections to-day: the Socialists seem to be going to lose seats (and no wonder considering Bismarck’s iron fist), but they are gaining numbers according to the voting.
“Sparling went down on Monday night to Reading to try to found a branch, after the good reception which he and Carruthers had there last week: but it was a dead failure: a good many had given their names to attend, but when it came to the scratch ‘with one consent they all began to make excuse’: I note this because it is characteristic of the present stage of the movement; for as above said there was plenty of agreement at the meetings we have held there. This hanging-back is partly fear of being boycotted by the masters; but chiefly from dislike to organization, for a question which the ‘respectable’ political parties ignore; and also fear of anything like revolt or revolution. . . .
“March 3rd. Sunday I spoke at Beadon Road; fair attendance of the usual kind; I met a posse of horse police going to St. Paul’s apropos of the S. D. F.’s Church-parade there; and there were also a crowd of police at the Metropolitan station. . . .
“The S. D. F. Church-parade went off well: they ought not to spoil it by having inferior ones at small churches now; but should change the entertainment. Which remark points to the weak side of their tactics: they must always be getting up some fresh excitement, or else making the thing stale and at last ridiculous; so that they are rather in the position of a hard-pressed manager of a theatre — what are they to do next? . . .
“March 9th. It is clear that the Government is in a shaky condition. The Union Liberals are beginning to see that the cat is going to jump the other way: Trevelyan made a speech at Devonshire House this week as good as renouncing the Tory alliance: so it seems the Liberal party is to be re-united on the basis of a Compromise Home Rule Bill; which will last as long as the Irish find convenient. Meantime the Government are threatening a very harsh Coercion Bill: indeed I shouldn’t wonder if they were to make it as stiff as possible in order to insure their own defeat, and then were to appeal to the country on the ground of law and order. All this is blessed bread to us, even the re-union of the Liberal party; because after all, that means the Whigs still retaining their hold of it, the stripping it more and more of anything which could enable it to pose as a popular party; while on the other hand it cripples the Radicals, and takes away all chance of their forming a popular party underneath the more advanced Liberals: so that in politics the break-up of the old parties and the formation of a strong reactionary party goes on apace. . . .
“Sunday I went to the new premises of the Hoxton Branch (the Labour Emancipation League) to lecture: I rather liked it: a queer little no-shaped slip cut off from some workshop or other, neatly whitewashed, with some innocent decoration obviously by the decorator member of the branch: all very poor but showing signs of sticking to it: the room full of a new audience of the usual type of attenders at such places: all working men except a parson in the front row, and perhaps a clerk or two, the opposition represented by a fool of the debating club type; but our men glad of any opposition at all. I heard that our branch lecture was a wretched failure. The fact is our branch, which was very vigorous a little time ago, is sick now; the men want some little new thing to be doing or they get slack in attendance. I must try to push them together a bit. I attended the Council meeting on Monday. It was in the end quarrelsome. . . . We passed a resolution practically bidding our speakers not to draw on quarrels with the police: though I doubt if they will heed it often: as some of them are ambitious of figuring as heroes in this ‘free-speech’ business. This is a pity; as if the police stick to it, they can of course beat us in the long run: and we have more out-a-door stations already than we can man properly. . . .
“March 20th. The annual meeting of our Hammersmith Branch came off: a dead failure, as all our meetings except the open-air ones have been lately. However I really think the savage second winter has had something to do with it; we have had a hard frost for nearly a fortnight now, and often a bitter blast of the N.E. with it; and our stable-meeting-room is not very warmable under such conditions.
“I lectured in the Chiswick Club Hall and had a scanty audience and a dull. It was a new lecture, and good, though I say it, and I really did my best; but they hung on my hands as heavy as lead. The open-air meeting at Walham Green in the morning was very creditable considering the cold weather and the underfoot misery.
“March 24th. 53 years old to-day-no use grumbling at that.”
The diary is continued for a month longer, but becomes more fragmentary as it goes on, and is filled in at longer intervals. On the 27th of April it ends, with the note, “I have been busy about many things, and so unable to fill up this book.”
Among these many things was his Odyssey. “I have just finished the 16th book,” he writes to his daughter on the 18th of February, “and am getting the first volume through the press.” This first volume was published early in April, and the second volume followed in November. It was received with the respect due to its merits. The first edition was sold out in six weeks: but it never became really popular, nor has it taken a place as the standard English version of Homer. It is perhaps one of the cases in which the disparity between the nature of the original and the method of rendering is no less vital because it lies below the surface. When Morris published the translation of the Æneid, the first criticism that occurred to many of his readers was that Homer rather than Virgil, and of the Homeric poems the Odyssey rather than the Iliad, was what he would render with the greatest sympathy and success. This may now be doubted. Notwithstanding his deep love and admiration for the Icelandic epics, notwithstanding the essentially Homeric tone of his own great Volsung epic, the romantic element in Virgil was perhaps more nearly akin to his own most intimate poetical instincts than the broader and more impersonal treatment which puts the Iliad and Odyssey in a class of poetry by themselves. It may further be questioned whether the metre chosen, admirably as it represents the Greek hexameter as regards length of line and rapidity of movement, is not one which lays traps for a translator by the very ease and variation of which its rhythm admits.
Morris prided himself upon the fidelity of his version to the original: “My translation is a real one so far,” he wrote of it to Ellis while it was in progress, “not a mere periphrase of the original as all the others are.” But a translation, whether of Homer or of any other great poet, which sets out to be literal, must of necessity incur the risk of a certain flatness and commonness in passages where the original is only poetical by virtue of some untransferable quality. More especially is this the case in rendering from the Greek. That wonderful language almost makes poetry of itself; it is at once the model and the despair of all other languages. A translation which aims at a high standard of literal accuracy doubles the difficulty, in any case immensely great, of reproducing the continuous dignity and elevation of Homer. And a metre of loose stricture invites the evasion of difficulties which are perhaps insoluble, and at all events are not solved in the least by being evaded. The epic hexameter, with all its elasticity, is accurately uniform in its metrical structure: it carries the poem forward unswervingly and unfalteringly. But the Sigurd-metre of Morris’ Odyssey, with an elasticity equal to that of the Greek hexameter itself, and a power (due to the great variation of which it admits) of attaining certain astonishing effects, suffers from this very quality in a tendency to relapse into formlessness. It is apt to revert into the mere inchoate metre from which it and the hexameter are both historical evolutions.
This tendency acts in two ways: in one way by stripping the metre, as one might say, to the bone. The couplet,
They sat and fell to feasting, and men of worth rose up And poured the wine unto them in many a golden cup,
goes back to the metre of the Niebelungenlied, of Nævius’s “Punic War,” and in all probability of the lost Greek epics, out of which was gradually evolved what we know by the name of Homer. But on the other hand it is apt to become overloaded. In lines like
Whether he should pray to the fair-faced, laying hand upon her knee,
or,
Bides she still with my child, and steadfast yet guardeth all my good?
the laxity of the metre allows it to pass into something that is barely metrical. In original writing the ear and taste of a good craftsman will keep him safe from both extremes. But in a translation, as all translators know, there is a temptation almost irresistible to take advantage of any licence the metre allows, a little here and a little there, till at last the accumulated result goes far beyond what the translator had meant or what the reader can readily approve. This is the reason why a successful verse translation, be it of Homer or Virgil or any other great poet, must be executed in a metre of accurate structure.
Morris was too conscientious an artist, and too deeply in sympathy with the spirit of the Saga, whether Greek or Northern, to make things easier for his readers by modernizations of language or sentiment, or by slurring whatever in the original is weak, or verbose, or in any way repellent to modern feeling. There is a measure of truth in what he said of the translation himself before it appeared: “I don’t think the public will take to it; it is too like Homer.” In fact, when due allowance is made for this defect in the medium chosen, one may well wonder that in a language which is so different from Greek, and which, with all its own merits, has so little of the specific Greek beauty, Morris succeeded in producing such radiant effects as he does. And if his translation has not become the standard English version, it is only because that place still remains empty.
Of another kind of calls on his time there is a ludicrous instance in a letter to his daughter written this spring. “Comes me here on Tuesday one of our Oxford Street chaps and says will I go call on a lady near Hans Place about some decoration. So yesterday I go — grumbling, but thinking like John Gilpin about the loss of pence: and coming to Hans Place find it a very architectoora-looral region: knock at the door: am shown into the drawing-room, when enter to me a lady who, after a very short preamble, requests me to look at some decoration that she was doing in the poker-style you know, burning the pattern in: and with a view of my helping her to a sale of these articles; her husband by the way being a swell in the War Office. My dear, the impudence of women is great; ask your Mama if she don’t think so. Moreover I was too much amused, and also flabbergasted, to walk out of the house without a word, so I had to finish my morning call with great gravity; a morning call also for which I can’t see my way for charging. How May did laugh at me when I came home!”
“I must tell you, my dear,” he says in another letter a little later, “that I am getting famous, or at least notorious, in Hammersmith town. The other day opposite the Nazareth a covered greengrocer’s cart hailed me as ‘Socialist!’ and then as ‘Morris!’ I don’t think this was meant to be complimentary. Also a week ago as I was going down Rivercourt Road, lo a small boy, chubby, about seven years old, sitting swinging on one of the iron gates, very uncomfortably I should think, as they have sort of cabbage ornaments, sings out to me: ‘Have a ride, Morris! ‘ At these two places I was known: but last Sunday it befel me to go to Victoria Park (beyond Bethnal Green) to a meeting. Now I have mounted a cape or cloak, grey in colour, so that people doubt whether I be a brigand or a parson: this seemed too picturesque for some ‘Arrys who were passing by, and sung out after me, Shakespeare, yah! ‘“
All through that hot summer of the Queen’s Jubilee he stayed in London, busily trying to keep the Socialist League together, and working hard at Merton against the continued depression of trade, but not too anxious to enjoy life in a way that he could hardly have done the year before. A few extras from letters written during these summer months may be added here.
“I am trying to get the League to make peace with each other and hold together for another year. It is a tough job; something like the worst kind of pig-driving I should think, and sometimes I lose my temper over it. It is so bewilderingly irritating to see perfectly honest men, very enthusiastic, and not at all self-seeking, and less stupid than most people, squabble so: and withal for the most part they are personally good friends together.”
“It was almost too good to be true to hear the rain tinkling on the leaves when I woke about half-past four, and O how pleasant it did feel! I have looked at Lewis Morris’ Ode; and looked away from it in wonder why people write odes: as Huck Finn would say, if I had a yaller dog that took to writing odes I would shoot him.”
“On Tuesday our water-party did actually come off, Aglaia, Opie and Mr. Leaf being the other ones besides Janey, Jenny and self. It turned out quite a success; we went by train to Richmond and then took a boat and went up to Hampton Court by slow degrees, rowing, sailing, and towing. We got to the Palace just half an hour before closing-time of the building, but didn’t mind about that. Our other male-man got out coming back at Surbiton, so that we were rather late; didn’t get to Teddington Lock till after 8; so that it was full night when we came out of it. So I had to set poor Aglaia to steer in the dark, or the dusk rather, as Jenny is short-sighted and Janey was too tired, and the two girls had been rowing a good bit already, so that I had to row till we were close to Richmond again. Aglaia was (naturally) nervous and kept on mistaking ‘nature’s boskage,’ or its shadow rather, for barges: but she did very well after all and we mightily enjoyed ourselves; Jenny especially, who was delighted with the night rowing and the glitter of the lights of Richmond Hill in the water, and the rather terrifying mysteries of a river by night.
“An improvement is to be noted at Hampton Court by the way. They have cleaned the tapestries; and taken the piece that used to be under the gallery and hung it in the Drawing Room so that it is quite visible, and have added another piece to it which I have never seen before and which is very fine. The Triumph of Time, also at the end of the Drawing Room, now it is cleaned shows a most splendid work: also they have opened a small room next to the Drawing Room, and that also is hung with tapestries, inferior to these, but still very beautiful.”
“This morning, as it is fresh and fair after the rain, I am going to throw dull care away and have a holiday, to wit I am going to Hampton Court by myself to look at the tapestries and loaf about the gardens.”
“I don’t know if you saw an article about the Working Men’s Clubs in the Daily News t’other day. I who know a good deal about these institutions grinned sardonically at its conventional rose-water. There is only a very small nucleus of really political working men: at Chiswick with a membership of 300 there are about 14 who interest themselves in politics: the Hackney Club 1,600 members, and about 100 political ones. Sunday beer, and weekday cards and billiards, are the real attraction. Moreover quite in contradiction to what the D. N. states, the only political working men’s clubs at all that are even worth mentioning are much infused with Socialism.”
“I have had one holiday this week: I went to see the Flowers (human) at Tangley Manor. It is a very beautiful old house: the old 14th century hall, at least its chief beam, being built up into a house of 1582. I grudged the vanishing of the older house in spite of the beauty of the other. A moat it has and a stone wall with holes in it, and many things desired by the righteous; and the country around is pleasant. But Lord! if I lived there, what a state of terror I should be in lest they should begin to build up round about. There is a beautiful pile of old barns fronting it which does not belong to Flower, but to a man who thinks that he looks upon them as an eyesore and wants to buy them to pull them down; and therefore he keeps them up, in order to stimulate Flower to bid a higher price for the land than it is worth.”
