Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/626

ÆT. 55] should be absolutely useless: and the immediate end to be gained, the pushing things just a trifle nearer to State Socialism, which when realized seems to me but a dull goal—all this quite sickens me. Also I know that there are a good many other idealists (if I may use that word of myself) who are in the same position, and I don't see why they should not hold together and keep out of the vestry-business, necessary as that may be. Preaching the ideal is surely always necessary. Yet on the other hand I sometimes vex myself by thinking that perhaps I am not doing the most I can merely for the sake of a piece of 'preciousness.'

"I have done another chapter to the tale, rather good I think, and shall get on with it as I can; and when finished shall set about revising before I get it into type."

The work of editing the Commonweal, which even in its first hopeful days had been unpleasant, had now in this altered frame of mind grown inexpressibly irksome. "I have been writing hard all the morning," he says on the 11th of August, "but not at what I like; have been simply pitching into Balfour and Salisbury, who will never see my scathing periods and wouldn't care if they did." The scathing periods, as they may still be found in the file of the Commonweal, make very dull reading now, as they made dull writing then. The only chances of writing what he liked that the scope of the Commonweal gave him he seized with avidity: just at this time he was in the middle of a vivid and detailed account of the Revolt of Ghent in the fourteenth century, including long passages of admirable translation from Froissart, which runs through the issues of seven weeks.

"I am prepared," he writes again a few weeks later, "to see all organized Socialism run into the sand for a