274 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
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 his life resumed the pleasurable quality, which for a time, under the compulsion of what seemed an overpowering duty, had been almost beaten out of it.
i;. "As to poetry," he writes in October, 1879, "I don't know, I don't know. The verse would come easy enough if I had only a sub- ject which would fill my heart and mind." Then followed most of the social writings, which are more numerous than one at first thought reckons. The list, fairly complete, runs as follows : Dream of John Ball ; Editorials for the Commonweal ; News frotn Nowhere; Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome ; Art and Socialism; Signs of Change; Hopes and Fears for Art; Chants for Socialists ; The Tables Turned; Pilgrims of Hope; Peems by the Way. Here I may refer to the index of the biography, which is generally good and complete, but lacking in failing to refer adequately to Morris' own writings.
Regarding different social writings, some of his biographer's words follow :
At a meeting held at Exeter Hall on the i6th of January, 1877, Morris appeared for the first time as a writer of political verse. "Wake, London Lads," a stirring ballad written by him for the occasion, was distributed in the hall, and sung with much enthusiasm.
The Dream of John Ball is spoken of as " the flower of his prose romances, the work into which he put his most exquisite descriptions and his deepest thoughts on human life." This was first published in the Commonweal, 1886-7.
Of the year 1890 Mr. Mackail writes :
With infinite patience Morris continued for some time yet to meet the demand made on his purse to meet the expense of the Com?»onweal ; and it was after his removal from the editorship that he contributed to it the successive chapters of his romance News from Nowhere. In the last chap- ter of this Morris showed he had "read the influences" of his beautiful Kelmscott Manor "in its entirety, clearly."
It is a curious fact that this slightly constructed and essentially insular romance \News from Nowhere] has, as a socialist pamphlet, been translated into French, German, and Italian, and has probably been more read in foreign
countries than any of his more important works in prose or verse The
immediate occasion which led Morris to put into a connected form those dreams of an idyllic future in which his mind was constantly hovering was no doubt the prodigious vogue which had been obtained the year before by an American Utopia — .Mr. l^eWzmy's once ceX^hriAeA Looking Backward. The
