Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/718

ÆT. 60] the names rich and poor might finally become alike obsolete in a common condition of civic and national well-being, had been from the first what Morris had striven after. He had joined the Socialist movement as a means, however indirect or uncertain, towards bringing about that end: and neither in the State Socialism of his earlier, nor in the Communal Socialism of his later theory, did he see anything beyond stages towards the birth of a final order. That final order might be described, for want of other terms, as the reorganization of the world under Socialism: but its actual nature, or the actual steps by which it was to be brought about, he perpetually insisted that it was impossible to lay out beforehand, or to forecast except by instinctive conjecture, and the imaginings of a prophet or a poet. As in Plato, the last words of philosophy were only to be expressed in the terms of a more or less conscious mythology. As in the days of the Hebrew prophets, the practical foundation of a kingdom of God on earth was to be wrought out by aid of that diffused imaginative ardour in which young men should see visions, and old men dream dreams. The visions of his own boyhood, the dreams of his own more advanced age, were but means towards expressing, and influences towards stimulating, the human movement itself, in which, through all doubts and discouragements, he had a permanent and a growing faith. No one insisted more strongly than he on the futility of any attempt to organize the future, or to lay down what would actually happen either in the progress towards the new age or in the final epoch of its attainment. In "The Dream of John Ball" he had shadowed out, in an allegorical setting of subtle and intricate beauty, the birth of a new world, seen, for one hour of intense spiritual exaltation, when the