Chapter VI: Translations and Socialism

The completion of _Sigurd the Volsung_ may conveniently be treated as a half-way house in Morris's career. The poet had fully proved himself. The lovely morning song of _Guenevere_, a little uncertain both in its own expression of life and in the direction along which it pointed the singer's development, but nevertheless clearly the promise of some memorable doings in the world of poetry, had matured through the simple clarity and joyousness of _Jason_ and _The Earthly Paradise_ into this fierce and elemental strength, corrected as it were from step to step by the practical experience of the poet's daily life. At the beginning of the translation of the Völsunga Saga he had written--

So draw ye round and hearken, English Folk,
Unto the best tale pity ever wrought--

and now he had fashioned that tale anew into its greatest presentment, raising its spirit into an expression worthy to rank with the supreme masterpieces of the world. His creativeness as poet had not exhausted itself, but it had achieved its most urgent purpose; it had evolved a life which the poet's imaginative longing told him might yet be realized on earth. From this time the business of setting the crooked straight among the affairs of his day began to absorb his attention and energy, and in the outcome he published but one more book of poems, which will be considered later. In 1875 he had printed his verse translation of _The Aeneids of Virgil_, about which, as was inevitable, the opinion of classical scholars was, and remains, divided. There is a quality in poetry which is finally untranslatable from one language to another, the quality that is knit into the words themselves. The ecstasy of which I have spoken is capable of a thousand shades of spiritual colour, and when a poet is moved by it he is moved by it in a kind that can never be precisely repeated, either in himself or another. The translator as a rule gives us the substance and loses this other quality altogether; the most that we can hope for is that he may be a poet himself, and, retaining the substance, substitute an ecstasy of his own which shall in some measure compensate for the loss of the particular exaltation of the original. This Morris does; reading his translation we may--indeed must--miss some essential Virgilian quality, but we have the great story faithfully told, and we have poetry. We may continue to ask for more than that, but we shall continue to be denied. This translation was followed by _The Odyssey_ in 1887 and _Beowulf_ in 1895.

The growth of Morris's socialism can fortunately be traced without divergence into chronological data. Of its nature we have already seen something in considering his poetry, but in _A Dream of John Ball_ and _News from Nowhere_ he defined it in detail, not only in its imaginative but also in its practical aspect. Before turning to these it will be well briefly to outline his movements in the later years of his life. The business of Morris and Company had already passed into his own hands, not without some difficulty--though without friction--in closing the partnership arrangements. This really meant but little added labour, as he had in effect been responsible for its control almost since its commencement. In 1877 he was asked whether he would accept the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford in the event of its being offered to him, and declined emphatically though graciously enough. In the next year he moved to the house on the Mall at Hammersmith to which was attached the lecture room where the early meetings of the Hammersmith Socialists were held, and his active propagandist work had begun. In addition to constant meetings and lectures on socialism and art, the conduct of his paper _The Commonweal_, and his own business affairs, he undertook any work that came to his hand for the furtherance of his fixed ideal. Among other things he was one of the founders and the first secretary of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, and finally he linked to his name the brief but noble career of the Kelmscott Press. He died on the 3rd of October, 1896, at the age of sixty-three, and was buried in the churchyard at Kelmscott, wearied out but not embittered by the strife of his later years and the insults of people who could only feel the vigour of his blows without understanding the cause in which they were struck.

_A Dream of John Ball_ was published in 1888. In it Morris gives once again a picture of that life lived in close contact with earth which he so earnestly desired, but it is not the complete life of _The Earthly Paradise_ or _News from Nowhere_. The people are not yet free, although they have not yet fallen to the indifference to freedom that Morris looked upon as the most distressing manifestation of his own day. Together with this picture we have a long discussion between John Ball, the people's priest, and the dreamer--Morris himself--as to the result of the risings that are then taking shape, and the future of civilization. The hope that the priest cries out to the people from the village cross becomes in turn the hope of Morris for his own generation, and slowly, in the talk that follows, the dreamer outlines the whole cause and effect of the evil that is analysed much more closely in _News from Nowhere_; the age of commercial tyranny that shall come will be strong in its days because the slaves will nurse the hope that they themselves may rise to the seats of the tyrants in turn--'and this shall be the very safeguard of all rule and law in those days.' John Ball speaks with the voice of Morris. When he was in prison he--

'lay there a-longing for the green fields and the white-thorn
bushes and the lark singing over the corn, and the talk of good
fellows round the ale-house bench, and the babble of the little
children, and the team on the road and the beasts afield, and all
the life of earth.'

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.