'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—