This strong disclaimer, though it smacks of that droll exaggeration in which Morris in a whimsical way sometimes indulged, expresses nevertheless the essential truth respecting his Socialist persuasion. Morris was a Socialist by reason of his whole intellectual and moral construction, and whatever circumstances eventually led him to realise and to proclaim himself a Socialist—and there were doubtless many—his Socialism was none the less a necessary expression of his whole nature.
His Socialism was of the Communist type, and he himself belonged to the old Utopian school rather than to the modern Scientific Socialist school of thought. It is true that occasionally he used distinctively Marxist phrases in his lectures, and so gave the impression that he accepted in the main the Scientific Socialist position. This was notably the case in that most unsatisfactory series of chapters, 'Socialism, from the Root Up,' which he wrote for the Commonweal in 1886-88 jointly with Belfort Bax, or rather, which, as he himself said, Bax wrote and he said ditto to. They were afterwards republished in book-form under the title, 'Socialism: its Growth and Outcome.' But no one who knew him personally, or was familiar with the general body of his writings, could fail to perceive that these Marxist ideas did not really belong to his own sphere of Socialist thought, but were adopted by him because of their almost universal acceptance by his fellow Socialists, and because he did not feel disposed to bother about doctrines which, whether true or false, hardly interested him. One perceives, especially in the case of 'Socialism, from the Root Up,' that dogmatism about the evolution of the family or the logical sequence of economic changes does not come within the range of Morris' line of Socialist vision. This he as good as acknowledged once when he said, alluding playfully to Bax's visits while they were writing the book together, 'I am going to undergo compulsory Baxination again to-day.'
His general conception of Socialism was formed in his
