News from Nowhere; Or, An Epoch of Rest<br />Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance by William Morris (best reads txt) 📗

We stopped at Wallingford for our mid-day meal; of course, all signs of squalor and poverty had disappeared from the streets of the ancient town, and many ugly houses had been taken down and many pretty new ones built, but I thought it curious, that the town still looked like the old place I remembered so well; for indeed it looked like that ought to have looked.

At dinner we fell in with an old, but very bright and intelligent man, who seemed in a country way to be another edition of old Hammond.  He had an extraordinary detailed knowledge of the ancient history of the country-side from the time of Alfred to the days of the Parliamentary Wars, many events of which, as you may know, were enacted round about Wallingford.  But, what was more interesting to us, he had detailed record of the period of the change to the present state of things, and told us a great deal about it, and especially of that exodus of the people from the town to the country, and the gradual recovery by the town-bred people on one side, and the country-bred people on the other, of those arts of life which they had each lost; which loss, as he told us, had at one time gone so far that not only was it impossible to find a carpenter or a smith in a village or small country town, but that people in such places had even forgotten how to bake bread, and that at Wallingford, for instance, the bread came down with the newspapers by an early train from London, worked in some way, the explanation of which I could not understand.  He told us also that the townspeople who came into the country used to pick up the agricultural arts by carefully watching the way in which the machines worked, gathering an idea of handicraft from machinery; because at that time almost everything in and about the fields was done by elaborate machines used quite unintelligently by the labourers.  On the other hand, the old men amongst the labourers managed to teach the younger ones gradually a little artizanship, such as the use of the saw and the plane, the work of the smithy, and so forth; for once more, by that time it was as much as—or rather, more than—a man could do to fix an ash pole to a rake by handiwork; so that it would take a machine worth a thousand pounds, a group of workmen, and half a day’s travelling, to do five shillings’ worth of work.  He showed us, among other things, an account of a certain village council who were working hard at all this business; and the record of their intense earnestness in getting to the bottom of some matter which in time past would have been thought quite trivial, as, for example, the due proportions of alkali and oil for soap-making for the village wash, or the exact heat of the water into which a leg of mutton should be plunged for boiling—all this joined to the utter absence of anything like party feeling, which even in a village assembly would certainly have made its appearance in an earlier epoch, was very amusing, and at the same time instructive.

This old man, whose name was Henry Morsom, took us, after our meal and a rest, into a biggish hall which contained a large collection of articles of manufacture and art from the last days of the machine period to that day; and he went over them with us, and explained them with great care.  They also were very interesting, showing the transition from the makeshift work of the machines (which was at about its worst a little after the Civil War before told of) into the first years of the new handicraft period.  Of course, there was much overlapping of the periods: and at first the new handwork came in very slowly.

“You must remember,” said the old antiquary, “that the handicraft was not the result of what used to be called material necessity: on the contrary, by that time the machines had been so much improved that almost all necessary work might have been done by them: and indeed many people at that time, and before it, used to think that machinery would entirely supersede handicraft; which certainly, on the face of it, seemed more than likely.  But there was another opinion, far less logical, prevalent amongst the rich people before the days of freedom, which did not die out at once after that epoch had begun.  This opinion, which from all I can learn seemed as natural then, as it seems absurd now, was, that while the ordinary daily work of the world would be done entirely by automatic machinery, the energies of the more intelligent part of mankind would be set free to follow the higher forms of the arts, as well as science and the study of history.  It was strange, was it not, that they should thus ignore that aspiration after complete equality which we now recognise as the bond of all happy human society?”

I did not answer, but thought the more.  Dick looked thoughtful, and said:

“Strange, neighbour?  Well, I don’t know.  I have often heard my old kinsman say the one aim of all people before our time was to avoid work, or at least they thought it was; so of course the work which their daily life forced them to do, seemed more like work than that which they seemed to choose for themselves.”

“True enough,” said Morsom.  “Anyhow, they soon began to find out their mistake, and that only slaves and slave-holders could live solely by setting machines going.”

Clara broke in here, flushing a little as she spoke: “Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them.”

“Surely,” said Morsom; “and they were puzzled as to what to do, till they found the feeling against a mechanical life, which had begun before the Great Change amongst people who had leisure to think of such things, was spreading insensibly; till at last under the guise of pleasure that was not supposed to be work, work that was pleasure began to push out the mechanical toil, which they had once hoped at the best to reduce to narrow limits indeed, but never to get rid of; and which, moreover, they found they could not limit as they had hoped to do.”

“When did this new revolution gather head?” said I.

“In the half-century that followed the Great Change,” said Morsom, “it began to be noteworthy; machine after machine was quietly dropped under the excuse that the machines could not produce works of art, and that works of art were more and more called for.  Look here,” he said, “here are some of the works of that time—rough and unskilful in handiwork, but solid and showing some sense of pleasure in the making.”

“They are very curious,” said I, taking up a piece of pottery from amongst the specimens which the antiquary was showing us; “not a bit like the work of either savages or barbarians, and yet with what would once have been called a hatred of civilisation impressed upon them.”

“Yes,” said Morsom, “you must not look for delicacy there: in that period you could only have got that from a man who was practically a slave.  But now, you see,” said he, leading me on a little, “we have learned the trick of handicraft, and have added the utmost refinement of workmanship to the freedom of fancy and imagination.”

I looked, and wondered indeed at the deftness and abundance of beauty of the work of men who had at last learned to accept life itself as a pleasure, and the satisfaction of the common needs of mankind and the preparation for them, as work fit for the best of the race.  I mused silently; but at last I said—

“What is to come after this?”

The old man laughed.  “I don’t know,” said he; “we will meet it when it comes.”

“Meanwhile,” quoth Dick, “we have got to meet the rest of our day’s journey; so out into the street and down to the strand!  Will you come a turn with us, neighbour?  Our friend is greedy of your stories.”

“I will go as far as Oxford with you,” said he; “I want a book or two out of the Bodleian Library.  I suppose you will sleep in the old city?”

“No,” said Dick, “we are going higher up; the hay is waiting us there, you know.”

Morsom nodded, and we all went into the street together, and got into the boat a little above the town bridge.  But just as Dick was getting the sculls into the rowlocks, the bows of another boat came thrusting through the low arch.  Even at first sight it was a gay little craft indeed—bright green, and painted over with elegantly drawn flowers.  As it cleared the arch, a figure as bright and gay-clad as the boat rose up in it; a slim girl dressed in light blue silk that fluttered in the draughty wind of the bridge.  I thought I knew the figure, and sure enough, as she turned her head to us, and showed her beautiful face, I saw with joy that it was none other than the fairy godmother from the abundant garden on Runnymede—Ellen, to wit.

We all stopped to receive her.  Dick rose in the boat and cried out a genial good morrow; I tried to be as genial as Dick, but failed; Clara waved a delicate hand to her; and Morsom nodded and looked on with interest.  As to Ellen, the beautiful brown of her face was deepened by a flush, as she brought the gunwale of her boat alongside ours, and said:

“You see, neighbours, I had some doubt if you would all three come back past Runnymede, or if you did, whether you would stop there; and besides, I am not sure whether we—my father and I—shall not be away in a week or two, for he wants to see a brother of his in the north country, and I should not like him to go without me.  So I thought I might never see you again, and that seemed uncomfortable to me, and—and so I came after you.”

“Well,” said Dick, “I am sure we are all very glad of that; although you may be sure that as for Clara and me, we should have made a point of coming to see you, and of coming the second time, if we had found you away the first.  But, dear neighbour, there you are alone in the boat, and you have been sculling pretty hard I should think, and might find a little quiet sitting pleasant; so we had better part our company into two.”

“Yes,” said Ellen, “I thought you would do that, so I have brought a rudder for my boat: will you help me to ship it, please?”

And she went aft in her boat and pushed along our side till she had brought the stern close to Dick’s hand.  He knelt down in our boat and she in hers, and the usual fumbling took place over hanging the rudder on its hooks; for, as you may imagine, no change had taken place in the arrangement of such an unimportant matter as the rudder of a pleasure-boat.  As the two beautiful young faces bent over the rudder, they seemed to me to be very close together, and though it only lasted a moment, a sort of pang shot through me as I looked on.  Clara sat in her place and did not look round, but presently she said, with just the least stiffness in her tone:

“How shall we divide?  Won’t you go into Ellen’s boat, Dick, since, without offence to our guest, you are the better sculler?”

Dick stood up and laid his hand on her shoulder, and said: “No, no; let Guest try what he can do—he ought to be getting into training now.  Besides, we are in no hurry: we are not going far above Oxford; and even if we are benighted, we shall have the moon, which will give us nothing worse of a night than a greyer day.”

“Besides,” said I, “I may manage to do a little more with my sculling than merely keeping the boat from drifting down stream.”

They all laughed at this, as if it had a been very good joke; and I thought that Ellen’s laugh, even amongst the others, was one of the pleasantest sounds I had ever heard.

To be short, I got into the new-come boat, not a little elated, and taking the sculls, set to work to show off a little.