Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

However abortive his attempts to gain political sympathy for his socialist program, and in spite of the fact that socialist agitation came to a standstill in England with the defeat of the somewhat chaotic socialism of the Chartists, it cannot be doubted that his efforts influenced the political reformers who were to take up one injustice after another and fight for its melioration until the working classes were at least brought to a plane where they could begin to organize and develop toward the still higher plane where they could themselves take their own salvation in hand.

Another man who did much to bring the workingman’s cause into prominence was Maurice, who emphasized the Christian aspect of the movement. He was an excellent supplement to Owen, whose liberal views on religion militated in some quarters against an acceptance of his humane views in regard to workingmen.

Notwithstanding the personal strength of these two men they failed not only in the practical attainment of their object, but their ideas on socialism did not even wedge itself into the thought consciousness of the Englishmen.

The men who did more than any one else to awaken the sleeping English consciousness were Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold and Morris. Of these Morris held a position midway between the old-fashioned dreamer of dreams and the new-fashioned hustling political socialist, who now sends his representatives to Parliament and has his “say” in the national affairs of the country.

Being a poet, he could, of course, dream dreams, and one of these, “The Dream of John Ball,” puts the case of the toilers in a form at once so convincing and so full of divine pity that it does not seem possible it could be read even by the most hardened of trust magnates without making him see how unjust has been the distribution of this world’s goods through the making of one man do the work of many: “In days to come one man shall do the work of a hundred men—yea, of a thousand or more: and this is the shift of mastership that shall make many masters and many rich men.” This is a riddle which John Ball cannot grasp at once, and when it is explained to him he is still more mystified at the result.

“Thou hast seen the weaver at his loom: think how it should be if he sit no longer before the web and cast the shuttle and draw home the sley, but if the shed open of itself, speed through it as swift as the eye can follow, and the sley come home of itself, and the weaver standing by ... looking to half a dozen looms and bidding them what to do. And as with the weaver so with the potter, and the smith, and every worker in metals, and all other crafts, that it shall be for them looking on and tending, as with the man that sitteth in the cart while the horse draws. Yea, at last so shall it be even with those who are mere husbandmen; and no longer shall the reaper fare afield in the morning with his hook over his shoulder, and smite and bind and smite again till the sun is down and the moon is up; but he shall draw a thing made by men into the field with one or two horses, and shall say the word and the horses shall go up and down, and the thing shall reap and gather and bind, and do the work of many men. Imagine all this in thy mind if thou canst, at least as ye may imagine a tale of enchantment told by a minstrel, and then tell me what shouldst thou deem that the life of men would be amidst all this, men such as these of the township here, or the men of the Canterbury guilds.”

And John Ball’s conclusion is that things in that day to come will be not as they are but as they ought to be. With irresistible logic he declares:

“I say that if men still abide men as I have known them, and unless these folk of England change as the land changeth—and forsooth of the men, for good and for evil, I can think no other than I think now, or behold them other than I have known them and loved them—I say if the men be still men, what will happen except that there should be all plenty in the land, and not one poor man therein ... for there would then be such abundance of good things, that, as greedy as the lords might be, there would be enough to satisfy their greed and yet leave good living for all who labored with their hands; so that these should labor for less than now, and they would have time to learn knowledge,” and he goes on, “take part in the making of laws.”

But Morris was not the man to dream, merely. Though he did not trouble himself about the doctrinaire side of socialism, he preached it constantly from the human side and from the artistic side. While some socialist writers make us feel that socialism might possibly only be Gradgrind in another guise, he makes us feel that peace and plenty and loveliness would attend upon the sons and daughters of socialism. As one of his many admirers says of him: “He was an out-and-out Communist because of the essential sanity of a mind incapable of the desire to monopolize anything he could not use.”

The authoritarianism of the Marxian socialists was distasteful to him, for, to quote from the same admirer, his “conception of socialism was that of a free society, based on the simple rights of all to use the earth and anything in it, and the consequent abolition of all competition for the means of life.” His attitude of mind on these points led him to break away from the Social Democratic Federation, which, with its political program, was distasteful to Morris’s more purely social feeling, and found the Socialist League. This emphasized more particularly the artistic side of socialism. Morris and his followers were bent upon making life a beautiful thing as well as a comfortable thing.