Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/715

306 might seem to have come full circle. But the experience, the thought, the labour of ten years had given to all the terms employed, and to all the measures advocated, an enlarged and deepened meaning. There had been much disappointment, much disillusion, much wreckage of unverified beliefs and extravagant hopes. The work had been tried by fire and tempest; over and over again had the superstructure crumbled or been consumed away down to the foundations. But these foundations, such was Morris's permanent conviction, were in the rock, and imperishable.

Any later expressions of his mind with regard to the immediate duties which lay before Socialists are in complete consonance with the manifesto of 1893. One of the most significant of these occurs in an address on Art and Labour which he delivered to the Guild of Lithographic Artists in February, 1894. "The new birth of art," he said there, "will be brought about noiselessly, gradually, and without violent change. We already see springing up round us the germs of this new life, the outward signs of which are trades-unionism, socialism, and co-operation." Such at least were his reported words. Whether or not he actually employed the singular collocation of the last sentence, the fact remains that Socialism as a practical movement, though not as an ultimate ideal, had come in his mind to occupy a place alongside of other movements, all of which were incomplete manifestations of a single spirit. It no longer anathematized whatever lay outside of its own specific body of doctrine. From extreme intransigeance it had swung back to something approaching opportunism. He that is not against us is on our part was rapidly becoming its test of orthodoxy.