ART AND LITERATURE
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by which the America of the present and future was driven, and to which
the English industrial nineteenth century had, in Morris's view, also fatal–
ly succumbed-and of which Morris's own compulsively restless life of
incessant toil was itself a dramatic symptom-the malady of alienated labor
finds one of its mos t poignant displaced expressions.
Nevertheless, a socialist-communist-anarchist society whose inhabi–
tants or citizens are almost universally happy is perforce a world of plenty;
how is that plenty achieved? It is achieved, one has reluctantly to say, by
cheating. Nowhere has apparently been deindustrialized, if not post-indus–
trialized; money and profit have been banished, and whatever is produced
is for "genuine use"; still, to produce even for genuine use requires work of
nearly every conceivable variety. How is that work accomplished? Old
Hammond, who lives in the disused British Museum and is the repository
of the history that almost everyone else has forgotten how to foretell,
informs the narrator: "All work which would be irksome to do by hand is
done by immensely improved machinery; and in all work which it is a plea–
sure to do by hand machinery is done without." This is the equivalent, I
believe, of sneaking back in through the rear door the onerous problem that
one has shoved out through the front. And this bit of innocuous double
dealing is compounded later on, when the narrator is contemplating some
cargo-carrying barges on the Thames that are moving along "without any
means of propulsion visible to me." He is told that these are "force-barges,"
and that vehicles are moved by land and water with equal ease by such
means. He then reflects: "I understood pretty well that these 'force vehicles'
had taken the place of our old steam-power carrying; but I took good care
not to ask any questions about them, as I knew well enough ... that I should
never be able to understand how they were worked ... so I merely said,
'Yes, of course, I understand.''' This mysterious source of power, it is clear–
ly implied, has been inherited from the pre-revolutionary world; it is
apparently inexhaustible and cannot be understood by the narrator alone
but, one suspects, by the users as well-and it is, to be sure, the equivalent
of magically perfected and decontaminated nuclear power.
Rebel against and resistor of the modern industrial world as he was,
Morris nonetheless remains in these narrative sleights of hand within the
mainstream of the Western tradition; the recapturing and reanimating of
the values and life-enhancing activities of the pre-capitalist and pre-indus–
trial worlds are to be achieved only through the attainment of a higher
measure of mastery over nature and the conscious deployment of its har–
nessed powers by human agents toward human ends. Indeed, the
transparent tomfoolery of these fumbling and off-handedly improvised
efforts to deal with what he has himself identified as an obdurately deep–
seated problem of any historically advanced Western society inadvertently
reveal the Victorian earnestness of Morris's undertaking.
