The Life of William Morris/Chapter 17

by John William Mackail

 

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's 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.

The translation of the Odyssey had been begun in February, but made little progress till summer, when he took to it with keen interest and advanced with it rapidly. "The Odyssey is to my mind much the most interesting of the two," he had written to Ellis when he first took up the translation, "but I may do the Iliad afterwards. It is hard work, much more so than the Virgil, owing to the great simplicity of the original, which never has a redundant word in it, or a word without a meaning: however it is very pleasant work." As it went on, its soothing effect over his nerves became more and more marked. At the beginning of September he alludes to its progress in a letter promising a visit to W. Bell Scott in his northern home at Penkill:

"I am of course much more from pillar to post since I have taken to the pernicious practice of what may be called professional agitation, professional though unpaid, except by general loss of reputation, which however is of no importance, and by no means balances on the wrong side the pleasure on the right side of being engaged in an important movement. Things seem to us more and more tending to a great change, though no doubt it will take time, and also there is a great expenditure of patience necessary to meet all the petty worries that encumber the progress of even great movements. I am also at work, as perhaps you have heard, at translating the Odyssey: this is very amusing: and a great rest from the other work: I am in the middle of the 9th book now."

On the 7th of September he writes to Kelmscott:

 

"Dearest Jenny,

"I am just writing a line to say that I am well and busy, though somewhat sulky at being dragged away from Kelmscott. The garden here is going the way of all London autumn gardens; but there is still a sort of pale prettiness about it, and there are a good many flowers in it, chiefly Japanese anemones and 'Chaynee oysters.' The gardener is busy to-day tidying up. Yesterday M. Guerrault called wanting work; Mr. York Powell (who is working with Gúdbrandr Vigfússon at Oxford) was with him: the conversation I regret to say was chiefly between Powell and me, as Guerrault talks little English and I—well. Powell is a very nice fellow, a good deal of a Socialist and very genial: he was born and bred in Walthamstow, though a Welsh one of blood: he used as a boy to come to Leyton House, he told me. I go to Merton Abbey to-day, and in the evening to a Fabian meeting, where it seems our people expect me to speak against the party of compromise. Young Tom Wardle was summoned for speaking at the Harrow Road Station, some weeks ago, and appeared at the police-court yesterday: he was committed for trial: he says he will not pay a fine—item his father says he won't. The Temperance people sent a deputation to us on the beautiful Monday that we others went to the White Horse on; they are quite prepared to work with us, and in fact we have made an alliance offensive and defensive with them: I think we shall beat the police in the long run after all. Even at the place where T. Wardle was summoned they have not interfered with us for three weeks.

"Dear me! my Jenny, what a nice four days I did have down there with you; I doubt if I ever enjoyed myself so much in my life: it was delightful and dear.

"I have a long letter from Mr. Birchall this morning about semi-Socialism: he is really a very sensible man: and Mr. Turner says he has very good knowledge of archæology. Well, my dear, I must now go to Merton. Best love, dear: also to all the party.

"Your loving father,
" W.M."

 

Later in the month he went to Edinburgh to give an address. On the journey, "I amused myself partly with Homer (110 lines) and partly with reading a new book which is very interesting, Russian Epic Songs to wit. The smoke hung low on Edinburgh, so that the mountains looked like strong outlines against the sky, and the ugly detail of the houses was a good deal bidden: so that there was something very fine about the whole view from the Castle Hill, to which I wandered before getting into the church where our window is. Our window is fine, and looks a queer contrast with its glittering jewel-like colour to the daubs about it. There is no station hotel at Edinburgh, so I had to make a shot at one, and it was a bad one too; dull and not over clean. It was quite respectable however, although its dulness was relieved by a sudden fight between the head waiter and a quarrelsome gentleman more or less in liquor. The waiter got the best of it and quite deserved to do so, as far as I could see. It was a curious piece of drama to note the attempts of the quarrelsome gentleman to get away with some kind of dignity, while his old antagonist, become the polite waiter again, brushed past him taking other people's orders."

Already literature both in prose and verse was filling up his mind. At the end of October he was full of new projects: "it really would be rather convenient to me to have a little gout in order to do some literary work." One of these projects, never carried out, was to rewrite and complete the fragments of the poem which had appeared in the Commonweal under the title of "The Pilgrims of Hope." The first half of the Odyssey was nearly completed. And he had begun to write the flower of his prose romances, the work into which he put his most exquisite descriptions and his deepest thoughts on human life, "The Dream of John Ball." It also was first published in the Commonweal, beginning in the number for the 13th of November, 1886, and concluding in that for the 22nd of January, 1887.

Even in his direct work for the party—for he still took his full share of duty as a Socialist speaker and on the executive of the League—the reviving literary instinct was beginning to show itself unmistakably. No sooner was "John Ball" completed than he began to write an elaborate diary of his work and of the movement of things generally in the world about him, with the view of compiling an exact contemporary chronicle. Like the Iceland diary of 1871, it was written with some more or less defined view of publication; "I am writing a diary," he says in a letter to his daughter, "which may one day be published as a kind of view of the Socialist movement seen from the inside, Jonah's view of the whale, you know, my dear." But it was carried on for only three months: and three months' experience may have sufficed to convince him that this sort of literature—if literature it was strictly to be called—was not on his own strongest side and was hampering him in more important work. The fragment has a double interest, both from passages which seem to show that he still treasured the hope of some sudden and surprising revolution in civilized life, and from other passages in which he criticises his party from the outside with a curiously dispassionate clearness. In both alike, and indeed all through, it has the unique transparency of a record of his actual thoughts at each moment, without any attempt at consistency, or at altering his forecasts in the light of actual events. The fragment has no heading. It opens with the words, "I begin what may be called my diary from this point, January 25th, 1887"; and then goes on without any further preface, "I went down to lecture at Merton Abbey last Sunday." One of its most noticeable features is the keen and even excited interest he takes in the course of current politics, both domestic and international. This is not indeed surprising in itself, for the time was one of uncertainty and excitement, but it contrasts curiously with the tone of lordly indifference adopted in the official journal of the Socialist League towards things that lay outside their own movement. The extracts which follow show what immense labour he continued to spend in the service of the League, and how clearly nevertheless he saw the weakness of their machinery and the futility of the greater part of their efforts, and of his own.

"I went down to lecture at Merton Abbey last Sunday: the little room was pretty full of men, mostly of the labourer class: anything attacking the upper classes directly moved their enthusiasm; of their discontent there could be no doubt, or the sincerity of their class hatred: they have been very badly off there this winter, and there is little to wonder at in their discontent; but with a few exceptions they have not yet learned what Socialism means; they and Frank Kitz were much excited about the Norwich affair, and he made a very hot speech: he was much exercised about the police being all about the place, detectives inside and so on: I fancy their game is to try to catch the club serving non-members with beer or in some way breaking the law. But there is no doubt that there is a good deal of stir amongst the labourers about there; the place is wretchedly poor.

"I slept at Merton, and in the morning got the Norwich paper with a full account of the trial of Mowbray and Henderson; the Judge's summing up of the case was amusing and instructive, as showing a sort of survival of the old sort of bullying of the Castlereagh times mixed with a grotesque attempt at modernization on philanthropical lines: it put me in a great rage.

"The Daily News printed my letter; it had also a brief paragraph asserting that Germany would presently ask France the meaning of her war preparations, and an alarmist article therewith. I did not know but what the other papers had the same news, and was much excited at the idea: because whatever one may say, one cannot help hoping that such a huge turmoil as a European war could not fail to turn to some advantage for us. Coming to town however I found that the evening papers poh-poh it as a mere hurrying up of the belated Daily News. Yet there may be something in it.

"At the Council of the Socialist League in the evening: the Avelings there mighty civil, but took no part in the proceedings. A dullish meeting, both sides rather shy of the Norwich matter, which but for the heaviness of the sentences would be but a pitiful affair; a committee was appointed to see after Mowbray's wife and children while he is in: a letter came from Norwich with the news of their having held a great meeting of 6,000 in the market-place on Sunday, at which they passed resolutions condemning the sentence, and in favour of the Social Revolution: though I fear few indeed out of the 6,000 knew what that meant. They were getting up a petition to the Home Secretary.

"Our attempt to get up an Irish meeting of the Radicals led by the Socialists will fail: we are not big enough for the job: the Radical clubs are civil to us but afraid of us, and not yet prepared to break with the Liberals....

"Jan. 26th. Went to South Kensington Museum yesterday with Jenny to look at the Troy tapestry again since they have bought it for ₤1,250: I chuckled to think that properly speaking it was bought for me, since scarcely anybody will care a damn for it. A. Cole showed us a lot of scraps of woven stuff from the tombs of Upper Egypt; very curious as showing in an unusual material the transition to the pure Byzantine style from the Classical: some pieces being nothing but debased Classical style, others purely Byzantine, yet I think not much different in date; the contrast between the bald ugliness of the Classical pieces and the great beauty of the Byzantine was a pleasing thing to me, who loathe so all Classical art and literature. I spoke in the evening at the Hammersmith Radical Club at a meeting to condemn the Glenbeigh evictions, the room crowded, and of course our Socialist friends there; my speech was well received, but I thought the applause rather hollow, as the really Radical part of the audience had clearly no ideas beyond the ordinary party shibboleths, and were quite untouched by Socialism: they seemed to me a very discouraging set of men; but perhaps can be got at somehow—the frightful ignorance and want of impressibility of the average English workman floors me at times.

"27th. I went to Merton yesterday on a lovely day. Wardle told me the whole story of what they are doing and are going to do at St. Mark's at Venice. I was incoherent with rage: they will soon finish up the whole thing there—and indeed everywhere else....

"Parliament is to meet to-day: that is not of much importance to 'we-uns': it is a matter of course that if the Government venture to bring forward a gagging-bill they will not venture to make it anything but an Irish one. For my part I should rather like the Liberals to get in again: for if they do, they must either push on the revolution by furthering Irish matters, which will be a direct gain to us; or they must sneak out of the Irish question, which would be an indirect gain to us, but a far greater one, as it would turn all that is democratic sick of them. It seems that they by no means want to get in, and I don't wonder, considering that dilemma.

"News this morning that Goschen has lost Liverpool.... It is curious to see how equally the parties are balanced in the electorate, by the way: and this again is hopeful for us, because it will force the Liberals to be less and less democratic, and so consolidate the Party of Reaction.

"Feb. 3rd. Went down to Rottingdean on Friday 28th and spent three or four days there: was very glad to leave the Newspapers alone while there: did Homer and an article for Commonweal.... I was very loth to come back; though as for holidays 'tis a mistake to call them rests: one is excited and eager always; at any rate during a short holiday, and I don't know what a long one means. The ordinary drifting about of a 'busy' man is much less exciting than these sort of holidays....

"Feb. 7th (Monday). On Friday I went up to the Chiswick club, where Mordhurst (one of our Hammersmith Branch) was to have opened a debate on the Class-war, but as he didn't turn up, I was called on to take his place: the room was not large; about twenty people there at first, swelling to forty perhaps before the end: the kind of men composing the audience is a matter worth noting, since the chief purpose of this diary is to record my impressions on the Socialist movement. I should say then that the speakers were all either of the better-to-do workmen or small tradesmen class, except Gordon Hogg, who is a doctor. ... My Socialism was gravely listened to by the audience, but taken with no enthusiasm, and in fact however simply one puts the case for Socialism one always rather puzzles an audience: the speakers, except Hogg and a young timid member of our branch, were muddled to the last degree; but clearly the most intelligent men did not speak: the debate was adjourned till next Friday, but I was allowed a short reply in which I warmed them up somehow. This description of an audience may be taken for almost any other at a Radical club, mutatis mutandis. The sum of it all is that the men at present listen respectfully to Socialism, but are perfectly supine and not in the least inclined to move except along the lines of Radicalism and Trades' Unionism....

"Yesterday (Sunday) we began our open-air meetings at Beadon Road, near the Broadway there. I spoke alone for about an hour, and a very fair audience (for the place, which is out of the way) gathered curiously quickly; a comrade counted a hundred at most. This audience characteristic of small open-air meetings, also quite mixed, from labourers on their Sunday lounge to 'respectable' people coming from church: the latter inclined to grin: the working men listening attentively trying to understand, but mostly failing to do so: a fair cheer when I ended, of course led by the three or four Branch members present....

"Feb. 12th. I have been on League business every night this week till to-night" (Saturday). "Monday the Council meeting peaceable enough, and dull.... Tuesday I took the chair at the meeting to protest against the (possible) coming war at Cleveland Hall Cleveland St., a wretched place once flash and now sordid, in a miserable street. It is the head-quarters of what I should call the orthodox Anarchists: Victor Dave the leading spirit there. Of course there were many 'foreigners' there, and also a good sprinkling of our people and I suppose of the Federation also. It was rather hard work getting through all the speeches in the unknown tongues of French and German, and the natives showed their almost superstitious reverence for internationalism by sitting through it all patiently: the foreign speakers were mostly of the 'orthodox Anarchists'; but a Collectivist also spoke, and one at least of the Autonomy section, who have some quarrel which I can't understand with the Cleveland Hall people: a Federation man spoke though he was not a delegate; also Macdonald of the Socialist Union: the Fabians declined to send on the grounds of the war-scare being premature: but probably in reality because they did not want to be mixed up too much with the Anarchists: the Krapotkine-Wilson people also refused on the grounds that bourgeois peace is a war, which no doubt was a genuine reason on their part and is true enough.... On Wednesday I went to lecture at a schoolroom in Peckham High Street.... Thursday I went to the Ways and Means Committee at the League: found them cheerful there on the prospects of Commonweal. I didn't quite feel as cheerful as the others, but hope it may go on. Friday I went in the evening to finish the debate begun last week: the room full. Sparling made a good speech; I didn't.

"Feb. 16th. Sunday I spoke on a very cold windy (N.E.) morning at the Walham Green Station: the people listened well though the audience was not large, about 60 at the most.... I lectured on 'Mediæval England' to a good audience here in the evening: lecture rather 'young'.

"Monday, Council meeting very quiet and short.... In the afternoon Bax called with Champion, who thinks of starting a new weekly, a private paper not so much a party journal as Commonweal, and bigger, as he is to be backed by money. He wanted my goodwill, which he is welcome to; but I distrust the long endurance of a paper at all commercial, unless there is plenty of money at its back. Champion spoke in a friendly way and was quite open and reasonable; but seems out of spirits about the movement: he has been extremely over-sanguine about getting people to 'show their strength,' which of course they won't do at present, as soon as it looks dangerous, and so he is correspondingly depressed at the poor performance of the Social Democratic Federation in agitation lately.

"Next Sunday they are going to have a 'Church-parade,' at St. Paul's: but unless they can get an enormous crowd, it will be a silly business, and if they do there will be a row; which got up in this way I think a mistake; take this for my word about the sort of thing: if a riot is quite spontaneous it does frighten the bourgeois even if it [is] but isolated; but planned riots or shows of force are no good unless in a time of action, when they are backed by the opinion of the people and are in point of fact indications of the rising tide....

"Feb. 23rd. I had a sort of threat of gout the last days of last week, so kept myself quiet at home.

"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 clubroom, 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 elections 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 structure 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's 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 last 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 architectooralooral 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 extracts 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's 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."

"I have now" (August 25th) "committed the irremediable error of finishing the Odyssey, all but a little bit of fair-copying. I am rather sad thereat."

"It is a beautiful bright autumn morning here, as fresh as daisies: and I am not over-inclined for my morning preachment at Walham Green, but go I must, as also to Victoria Park in the afternoon. I had a sort of dastardly hope that it might rain. Mind you, I don't pretend to say that I don't like it in some way or other, when I am on my legs. I fear I am an inveterate word-spinner and not good for much else."

"I had three very good days at Kelmscott" (in September): "once or twice I had that delightful quickening of perception by which everything gets emphasized and brightened, and the commonest landscape looks lovely; anxieties and worrits, though remembered, yet no weight on one's spirits—Heaven in short. It comes not very commonly even in one's younger and brighter days, and doesn't quite leave one even in the times of combat."

Late in that autumn was produced the most singular of all Morris's literary adventures, the little play entitled "The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened." "I have been writing," he says on the 24th of September, "a—what?—an 'interlude' let's call it, to be acted at Farringdon Road for the benefit of Commonweal." It was performed there on the 15th of October, Morris himself acting in it, and was so successful that it was repeated three times. The dramatic form was one which he had essayed long before in a very different material. "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," "The Fall of Troy," and "Love is Enough," are a trilogy which is strangely concluded by this satyric piece.

In the contemporary theatre and in the modern actor's art Morris had not, and never affected to have, the slightest interest. From a very different point of view, he had for many years come to the same conclusion as Matthew Arnold in pronouncing the modern English theatre the most debased in Europe. Since the days of his early enthusiasm for Robson and Kean he hardly ever had gone to a play, unless on some rare occasion when he took his children or was dragged off by a friend. Nor has "The Tables Turned" anything that can be called a plot, any dramatic artifice, or any characterization beyond that of a mediæval mystery play. "If he had started a Kelmscott Theatre," says one of the most enthusiastic and most paradoxical of his followers, "instead of the Kelmscott Press, I am quite confident that in a few months, without going half a mile afield for his company, he would have produced work that would within ten years have affected every theatre in Europe." As a personal impression this assertion is interesting, but unverifiable. As a matter of fact nothing came of the experiment in which the method of the Townley Mysteries was applied to a modern farce. "Morris was so interested," the critic just quoted adds, "by his experiment in this sort of composition that he for some time talked of trying his hand at a serious drama, and would no doubt have done it had there been any practical occasion for it, or any means of consummating it by stage representation under proper conditions, without spending more time on the job than it was worth. It was impossible for such a born teller and devourer of stories as he was to be indifferent to an art which is nothing more than the most vivid and real of all ways of storytelling." It is certainly true that he was just then casting about for some new method of expressing the thought working inside him, and getting rid of his superabundant creative energy. So it had always been in all his practice of the arts: no sooner had he mastered one art—were it illuminating, or carpet-weaving, or narrative poetry—than he passed eagerly on to master another: and just now, "rather lost," as he says, "with the conclusion of my Odyssey job, and on the look-out for another," he may have thought now and then of the dramatic form as one in which he might begin a new and interesting series of researches and experiments in order to recover, as in the other arts, the dropped thread of the mediæval tradition. But if so, it was not seriously, nor for long: and in the series of prose romances which he began soon afterwards, and which were continued through the remaining years of his life, he found a vehicle of new expression more satisfying to his imagination and better suited to his familiar methods.

The part which Morris himself took in the play was that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was supposed to have been called as a witness for the defence in a police prosecution of a member of the Socialist League. The charge was one of obstruction and incitement to riot by speaking from a stool (as Morris so often did) on a Sunday forenoon at Beadon Road, Hammersmith. "Under the pretext of paying a visit to my brother of London," the Archbishop had got into a cab and gone off to see what these Socialist meetings were like. "To the best of my remembrance," he states in evidence, "there were present at the commencement of your discourse but three persons exclusive of yourself"—namely, a colleague of the lecturer, the Archbishop himself, and a small boy. The discourse "was a mass of the most frightful incendiarism. He even made an attack on my position, stating (wrongly) the amount of my moderate stipend." The audience, he further states, had increased to ten by the time the orator concluded. The scene, which was received by the audience, most of them familiar with those Sunday street meetings, with uncontrolled amusement, gave the ludicrous side of a bitter truth. Often Morris had himself spoken, both in doors and out of doors, to as small an audience. A few months earlier, a lecture on Feudal England, into which no other man alive could have put an equal combination of historical knowledge, imaginative insight, and romantic sympathy, had been delivered to an audience of nine people, not one of whom probably understood what it was about. That such entire public apathy regarding the Socialist ideal should co-exist with the presence of revolution actually at the door (the trial in this play is broken off by its triumphal outbreak) is a situation well enough suited for a farce which is intentionally and wildly extravagant. But it seems that even then the combination was one in which the more ardent members of the League had not in the least abandoned belief.

For that strange belief, in which Morris no doubt had once to a certain degree shared ("as his way was about everything, to make it something different from what it was," the habit of boyhood surviving undiminished into mature life), the events of the next month in London gave some sort of colour. A longcontinued depression of trade had made the question of the unemployed, in London and elsewhere, more than usually serious; and the restlessness among the working classes culminated in the famous scenes of the 13th of November, "Bloody Sunday," in and round Trafalgar Square. A meeting in the Square had been announced to protest against the Irish policy of the Government: it had been proclaimed by the police, and became converted into a demonstration on a huge scale. No one who saw it will ever forget the strange and indeed terrible sight of that grey winter day, the vast sombre-coloured crowd, the brief but fierce struggle at the corner of the Strand, and the river of steel and scarlet that moved slowly through the dusky swaying masses when two squadrons of the Life Guards were summoned up from Whitehall. Morris himself did not see it till all was nearly over. He had marched with one of the columns which were to converge on Trafalgar Square from all quarters. It started in good order to the number of five or six thousand from Clerkenwell Green, but at the crossing of Shaftesbury Avenue was attacked in front and on both flanks by a strong force of police. They charged into it with great violence, striking right and left indiscriminately. In a few minutes it was helplessly broken up. Only disorganized fragments straggled into the Square, to find that the other columns had also been headed off or crushed, and that the day was practically over. Preparations had been made to repel something little short of a popular insurrection. An immense police force had been concentrated, and in the afternoon the Square was lined by a battalion of Foot Guards, with fixed bayonets and twenty rounds of ball cartridge. For an hour or two the danger was imminent of street-fighting such as had not been known in London for more than a century. But the organized force at the disposal of the civil authorities proved sufficient to check the insurgent columns and finally clear the streets without a shot being fired. For some weeks afterwards the Square was garrisoned by special drafts of police. Otherwise London next day had resumed its usual aspect.

Once more the London Socialists had drawn into line with the great mass of the London Radicals, and a formidable popular movement had resulted, which on that Sunday was within a very little of culminating in a frightful loss of life and the practical establishment of a state of siege in London. But the English spirit of compromise soon made itself felt. While on the one hand the impotence of a London crowd against armed and drilled forces had been crushingly demonstrated, on the other hand the public were startled into seriousness. Measures were taken for the relief of the unemployed. Political Radicalism resumed its normal occupations; and by the end of the year the Socialist League had dropped back to its old place, a small body of enthusiasts among whom an Anarchist group were now beginning to assume a distinct prominence. The only other important public occasion in which Morris took part during the rest of the year was on the 18th of December. A young man named Alfred Linnell had died in hospital from injuries received from the police in the struggle of Bloody Sunday. A public funeral was organized. In pouring rain a great but orderly crowd marched through the mid-winter dusk from Soho to Bow Cemetery, where the burial service was read by the light of a lantern. The stately verses which Morris wrote for the occasion are well known. Less known, but perhaps not less worthy of remembrance, is the brief speech which he delivered over the grave. The other speakers—Mr. Tims of Battersea, Mr. Dowling of the Irish National League, Mr. Quelch of the Social Democratic Federation—had improved the occasion with obvious sincerity, but in phrases that were rapidly becoming mere commonplaces of journalism and losing any definite meaning: protesting against what they described as the autocracy of the police, speaking of hired murderers in uniform, and a ruling class trembling in its shoes. Morris's words, spoken to a crowd fast melting away in the darkness and rain, tried to recall the larger and nobler issue. "Our friend who lies here has had a hard life, and met with a hard death; and if society had been differently constituted, his life might have been a delightful, a beautiful, and a happy one. It is our business to begin to organize for the purpose of seeing that such things shall not happen; to try and make this earth a beautiful and happy place."

"The scene at the grave," he writes a few days afterwards, "was the strangest sight I have ever seen, I think. It was most impressive to witness; there was to me something aweful (I can use no other word) in such a tremendous mass of people, unorganized, unhelped, and so harmless and good-tempered."

This feeling of pity for the helplessness of the masses had throughout stood alongside of his indignation at the practical barbarism of the commercial system as the dominant force in his mind. When he saw the multitudes—if we may recall in so different a context the august words of the Evangelist^[1]—he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd. The direct result of all his efforts to bring them together and lead them on was indeed little enough. The smallness of the numbers of really convinced supporters, however much the opportunist section of English Socialists might try to swell them out by various bodies of men in buckram, was a fact to which he never blinded himself, nor was he less keenly alive to the prodigious difficulty of accustoming men's minds in England to conceive the possibility of any changes being effected by other than the familiar Parliamentary methods. "I have always known," he writes on the 26th of February, 1887, to Ellis, "that if ever there were a Socialist party in England they would have to send men to Parliament, though I certainly wouldn't be one of them. But 'tis no more use a sect blustering about getting itself 'represented' than it is about its conquering the world by dynamite and battle. 'Tis barely possible to get a Radical returned as a Radical, let alone a Socialist. Still things have moved much within the last four years, and they will no more stop for the capitalists than they will hurry for me." But it was not all waste labour. "Men fight and lose the battle," says John Ball, "and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant." The silent permeation of a new spirit was making itself felt. The doctrines on which Socialism is founded were slowly beginning to modify common thought. Education towards revolution, Morris's own watchword as a Socialist, was in one sense or another rapidly becoming the order of the day. In the larger sphere of politics a change of tone was beginning to be manifest. Significant utterances began to be heard from supporters of the existing organization. The celebrated words, "We are all Socialists now," had already been uttered by an ex-Minister in the House of Commons. Professed Socialists had been invited to read papers at the Church Congress, and a Bishop had startled his colleagues by publicly declaring the contrast between the rich and poor to be so appalling that serious consideration was due to any scheme, no matter how revolutionary, that promised relief. And about Morris himself a group of artists and craftsmen were gathering, who, without following his principles to their logical issues or joining any Socialist organization, were profoundly permeated with his ideas on their most fruitful side, that of the regeneration, by continued and combined individual effort, of the decaying arts of life. Among these men, a small body, but growing in numbers, strong in youth, ardent in assured conviction, Morris's final words on the Beauty of Life were at last working with their full force. "To us who have a cause at heart, our highest ambition and our simplest duty are one and the same thing. For the most part we shall be too busy doing the work that lies ready to our hands to let impatience for visibly great progress vex us much. And surely, since we are servants of a cause, hope must be ever with us."

Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. Such too had been the last word of the despised eighteenth century.

 

1. Matthew 9:36 (Wikisource-ed.)