Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/500

ÆT. 49] help? By renouncing our class, and on all occasions when antagonism rises up between the classes, casting in our lot with the victims; those who are condemned at the best to lack of education, refinement, leisure, pleasure, and renown; and at the worst, to a life lower than that of the most brutal of savages. There is no other way."

There can be little doubt that this passage, though not written till after he had joined a Socialist organization, expresses with great accuracy the frame of mind which made him take the step of joining it. In addressing middle-class audiences this was the offer which he distinctly made them: "To these I offer a means," were his words, repeated again and again on public platforms, "of renouncing their class by joining the only body in this country which puts forward constructive Socialism as its programme."

That, if the privileged classes became merged in a Third Estate, national equality and national unity would be the result, is a thesis which may be variously argued either in abstract logic or from the lessons of history. But it is perhaps more to the point to ask how far it is possible in the nature of things that a man should renounce his class. Into that class he was born: in it he has grown and lived: it environs him with the constant pressure of an atmosphere: he clings to it and draws his daily life out of it by a thousand filaments of inherited tradition and acquired habit. To many it may seem that Arnold, and not Morris, in this instance pointed out the true path. Morris's own language with regard to the matter, while not always strictly consistent, often indicates that he saw as clearly as any man the hopelessness of any attempt to elevate the working class from without. He never deceived himself into think-