Old Familiar Faces

by Theodore Watts-Dunton

reads these two books, [263] and yet his socialism comes from an entirely æsthetic impulse. It is the vulgarities of civilization, it is the ugliness of contemporary life—so unlike that Earthly Paradise of the poetic dream—that have driven him from his natural and proper work. He cannot take offence at our saying this, for he has said it himself in ‘Signs of Change’:—

“As I strove to stir up people to this reform, I found that the causes of the vulgarities of civilization lay deeper than I had thought, and little by little I was driven to the conclusion that all these uglinesses are but the outward expression of the innate moral baseness into which we are forced by our present form of society, and that it is futile to attempt to deal with them from the outside. Whatever I have written, or spoken on the platform, on these social subjects is the result of the truths of socialism meeting my earlier impulse, and giving it a definite and much more serious aim; and I can only hope, in conclusion, that any of my readers who have found themselves hard-pressed by the sordidness of civilization, and have not known where to turn to for encouragement, may receive the same enlightenment as I have, and that even the rough pieces in this book may help them to that end.”

With these eloquent words no one can more fully agree than we do, so far as they relate to the unloveliness of Philistine rule. But

though the bad features of the present time [264] are peculiar to itself, when were those paradisal days of which Morris dreams? when did that merry England exist in which the general sum of human happiness and human misery was more equally distributed than now?

Those “dark ages” beloved of the author of ‘John Ball’ may not have been quite so dark as Swinburne declares them to have been; but in this matter of the equalization of human happiness were they so very far in advance of the present time? Those who have watched the progress of Morris’s socialism know that, so far from being out of keeping with the “anti-scrape” philippics and the tapestry weaving, it is in entire harmony with them. Out of a noble anger against the “jerry builder” and his detestable doings sprang this the last of the Morrisian epics, as out of the wrath of Achilles sprang the Iliad. That the picturesqueness of the John Ball period should lead captive the imagination of Morris was, of course, inevitable. Society is at least picturesque wheresoever the classes are so sharply demarcated as they were in the dark ages, when the difference as to quality of flesh and blood between the lord and the thrall was greater than the difference between the thrall and the swine he tended. But what about the condition of this same picturesque thrall who (as the law books have it)

“clothed the soil”—whose every chance of happiness, whose every chance of comfort, depended upon the arbitrary will of some more or less brutal lord? What was the condition of the English lower orders—the orders for whom many bitter social tears are now being shed? What about the condition of the thralls in dark ages so dark that even an apostle of Wyclif’s (this same John Ball, Morris’s hero) preached the doctrine—unless he has been belied—that no child had a soul that could be saved who had been born out of wedlock? The Persian aphorism that warns us to beware of poets, princes, and women must have had a satirical reference to the fact that their governance of the world is by means of picturesqueness. Always it has been the picturesqueness of tyranny that has kept it up. It was the picturesqueness of the auto de fe that kept up the Spanish Inquisition, but we may rest assured that the most picturesque actors in that striking tableau would have preferred a colourless time of jerry builders to a picturesqueness like that. To find a fourteenth-century pothouse parlour painted by a modern Socialist with a hand more loving than Walter Scott’s own is indeed touching:—

“I entered the door and started at first with my old astonishment, with which I had woke up, so strange and beautiful did this interior seem to me, though it was but a pothouse parlour. A quaintly carved sideboard held an array of bright pewter pots and dishes and wooden and earthen bowls; a stout oak table went up and down the room, and a carved oak chair stood by the chimney-corner, now filled by a very old man dim-eyed and white-bearded. That, except the rough stools and benches on which the company sat, was all the furniture. The walls were panelled roughly enough with oak boards to about six feet from the floor, and about three feet of plaster above that was wrought in a pattern of a rose stem running all round the room, freely and roughly done, but with (as it seemed to my unused eyes) wonderful skill and spirit. On the hood of the great chimney a huge rose was wrought in the plaster and brightly painted in its proper colours. There were a dozen or more of the men I had seen coming along the street sitting there, some eating and all drinking; their cased bows leaned against the wall, their quivers hung on pegs in the panelling, and in a corner of the room I saw half a dozen bill-hooks that looked made more for war than for hedge-shearing, with ashen handles some seven foot long. Three or four children were running about among the legs of the men, heeding them mighty little in their bold play, and the men seemed little troubled by it, although they were talking earnestly and seriously too. A well-made comely girl leaned up against the chimney close to the gaffer’s chair, and seemed to be in waiting on the company: she was clad in a close-fitting gown of bright blue cloth, with a broad silver girdle, daintily wrought, round her loins, a rose wreath was on her head, and her hair hung down unbound; the gaffer grumbled a few words to her from time to time, so that I judged he was her grandfather.”

“Morris’s ‘Earthly Paradise’!” the reader will exclaim. Yes; and here we come upon that feature of originality which, as has been before said, distinguishes Morris’s socialism from the socialism of the prosaic reformer.

Political opinions almost always spring from temperament. The conservative temper of such a poet as Sir Walter Scott leads him to idealize the past, and to concern himself but little about the future. The rebellious temperament of such a poet as Shelley leads him to idealize the future, and concern himself but little about the past. But by contriving to idealize both the past and the future, and mixing the two idealizations into one delicious amalgam, the poet of the ‘Earthly Paradise’ gives us the Morrisian socialism, the most charming, and in many respects the most marvellous product of “the poet’s mind” that has ever yet been presented to an admiring world.

The plan of ‘John Ball’ is simplicity itself. The poet in a dream becomes a spectator of the insurrection of the Kentish men at the time when Wat Tyler rebelled against the powers that were; and the hero, John Ball, who is mainly famous as having preached a sermon from the text