REVIEWS 273
desire that something more startling could be done than mere constant pri- vate grumbling and occasional public speaking to lift the standard of revolt against the sordidness which people are so stupid as to think necessary.
The progress of his mind toward active socialism during these two years is recorded in the private letters when he sets down his thoughts or his belief from one day to another with complete transparency. Through many fluctu- ations of mood, one may trace a gradual advance. Some people, even among those who knew him well, thought of his socialism as a sudden and unaccount- able aberration ; or, at all events, fancied it a movement into which he flung himself in a sudden fit of enthusiasm, without having thought the matter out, and acting on a rash impulse. How much this is the reverse of the truth becomes plain when one traces the long struggle, the deep brooding, through which he arrived at his final attitude, and notes the distaste and reluctance which he often felt for the new movement, which at other moments shone out to him as the hope of the world.
-Another of his statements in this year is : " All political change seems to me useful now in making it possible to get the social one." Further on, while giving the chronicle of 1882, Mr. Mackail notes :
While it is true to say that during these months Morris was moving toward socialism, it would also be true to say that socialism was moving toward him.
Noting the authors who had educated him and moved him in those days, the biographer says :
More's Utopia had no inconsiderable influence over him ; much more, it seems, than the professedly socialistic treatises — Marx' Capital, Wallace's Land Nationalization, and the like, which he had been rather dispiritedly ploughing through. Socialists more versed in economic theory than himself were inclined to accuse him of sentimentalism, and in this, as in other spheres of activity, the demands of the romantic imagination were as imperious in him as ever.
After recounting his most energetic work in writing and speaking for the cause for three successive years, his relinquishing some of these active duties is spoken of thus :
His principles had changed little when he became a declared socialist ; they changed even less now. He held as strongly as ever that education toward revolution was the end to be steadily pursued. But the terms "education" and " revolution " had begun 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
