Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/625

216 "The Dream of John Ball" was published as a book that month, and was followed two months later by the volume of lectures and addresses entitled "Signs of Change." This volume once cleared out of the way, his mind reverted with full force to the romance and simplicity of a remoter past. An epoch of swift change, even were it in the nature of progress, was distasteful to his temperament. He was continually seeking refuge from it in dreams of some settled and seeming-changeless order, whether seen as a vision of the future or recreated from a tradition of the past. The old world which he had summoned up in "John Ball" was one that had none of this stability. Its period was that of the breaking up of the mediæval system, and the beginnings of times of change, destruction and unsettlement. In the new romance which he now began to write, he went back from the close of the Middle Ages to their earliest beginnings, and from a complex artificial society to the simplest of all known to history. This story, "The House of the Wolfings," was the first of a series of prose romances which he went on writing almost continuously down to the end of his life.

"I am a little dispirited over our movement in all directions," he writes to Mrs. Burne-Jones on the 29th of July. "Perhaps we Leaguers have been somewhat too stiff in our refusal of compromise. I have always felt that it was rather a matter of temperament than of principle; that some transition period was of course inevitable, I mean a transition involving State Socialism and pretty stiff at that; and also, that whatever might be said about the reception of ideal Socialism or Communism, towards this State Socialism things are certainly tending, and swiftly too. But then in all the wearisome shilly-shally of parliamentary politics I