Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/568

ÆT. 52] everything else is gone now. And now at last when the corruption of society seems complete, there is arising a definite conception of the new order, with its demands in some sort formulated. In the details of that I do not myself feel any great confidence, but that they have taken so much form is hopeful, because unless the new is near to the birth, however rotten the old may be, rebellion against it is mere hopeless grumbling and railing, such as you used to reproach me with.

"Meantime what a little ruffles me is this, that if I do a little fail in my duty some of my friends will praise me for failing instead of blaming me. I have a pile of worry about the party ahead of me when I am about again, which must excuse me for dwelling on these things so much."

"They made it up last night," he writes a few days later of the particular quarrel which was then agitating the party. "Even such things as this—the army setting off to conquer all the world turning back to burn Jack's pigstye, and tumbling drunk into the fire—even this don't shake me: means one must use the best one can get; but one thing I won't do, wait for ever till perfect means are made for very imperfect me to work with. As to my not looking round, why it seems to me that no hour of the day passes that the whole world does not show itself to me."

Such was the courage with which Morris met apparent failure. He was soon to be more seriously alarmed by a sudden though elusive prospect of premature success. It was being borne in on him by bitter daily experience how unripe the Socialist party was; how discordant in its aims, how unfixed in its principles, how incapable of forming or guiding any large popular movement. On the 8th of February,