Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/587

178 of November, 1886, and concluding in that for the 22nd of January, 1887.

Even in his direct work for the party—for he still took his full share of duty as a Socialist speaker and on the executive of the League—the reviving literary instinct was beginning to show itself unmistakably. No sooner was "John Ball" completed than he began to write an elaborate diary of his work and of the movement of things generally in the world about him, with the view of compiling an exact contemporary chronicle. Like the Iceland diary of 1871, it was written with some more or less defined view of publication; "I am writing a diary," he says in a letter to his daughter, "which may one day be published as a kind of view of the Socialist movement seen from the inside, Jonah's view of the whale, you know, my dear." But it was carried on for only three months: and three months' experience may have sufficed to convince him that this sort of literature—if literature it was strictly to be called—was not on his own strongest side and was hampering him in more important work. The fragment has a double interest, both from passages which seem to show that he still treasured the hope of some sudden and surprising revolution in civilized life, and from other passages in which he criticises his party from the outside with a curiously dispassionate clearness. In both alike, and indeed all through, it has the unique transparency of a record of his actual thoughts at each moment, without any attempt at consistency, or at altering his forecasts in the light of actual events. The fragment has no heading. It opens with the words, "I begin what may be called my diary from this point, January 25th, 1887"; and then goes on without any further preface, "I went down to lecture at Merton Abbey last Sun-