With all the grime and tedium of the dull ’eighties lying upon his soul, Morris finds himself transported to a world which has been cleansed by a revolution of a greater part of the nineteenth century landmarks. In the meanwhile, grass has laid a decent blanket over many irretrievable ruins. The house in which he has gone to bed is now a Guest House; and he is first received into this refurbished world by a boatman who takes him for a morning swim on the Thames, and knows about the value of money only as a collector of copper curios might. At breakfast, he finds himself among a group of friendly people, who call him “Guest”; and he is taken firmly and sweetly and quite serenely in hand by the comely young women who preside over the house. These women, like everyone else in the new Thames valley, are healthy, full-blooded, athletic, sane, and free from the puling maladies which idleness or overwork gave to the women of the nineteenth century. The other guests are a weaver who has come down from the north to take a turn at the boatman’s job while the latter goes up towards Oxford to help gather in the hay, and a loquacious dustman in marvellous greens and golds.
In this new England, work has become what one would call in the kindergarten “busy work”: in the simplification of the standard of living and the release from the pressure of artificially stimulated wants, the main business of getting a living is easily performed, and the chief concern of everyone is to do his work under the pleasantest conditions possible—a demand which brings back many of the handicrafts, and places a great premium on manual skill. Although the mechanical arts have been improved in certain directions, for in his trip up the Thames our guest meets with a barge driven by some internal engine, let us say by electricity, a good many devices have been allowed to fall into disuse, because, although the output in goods might be greater, the work itself and the way of life it promotes are not so beneficial as the simple methods of hand labor. In every direction, simplicity and direct action and the immediate supply and interchange of goods out of local produce, has taken the place of the monstrously complicated system of traffic that prevailed in the earlier imperialistic world. Work is given freely, and the proceeds of work exchanged freely, as a man might give of his goods and services nowadays when he welcomes a friend within his own house. A great part of the energy of this new community has gone into building; and architecture, sculpture, and painting flourish in the townhalls and common dining halls of which each village boasts.
It follows from this that the big cities have disappeared. London is again a congeries of villages, mingled in great woodlands and meadows where in the summer children roam about and camp and pick up the simple occupations of rural life. Of all the proud monuments of London that the nineteenth century left, only the Houses of Parliament remain, as a storage-place for dung. There are shops, where one takes for the asking, and there are common halls where people eat and have conversation, as they do now in restaurants—only these new hostels are beautiful, spacious, and well-served.
Since economic pressure is absent, the people of the Thames valley seem to live a life of leisure; but this life of leisure is not the aimless leisure of the country house, with its artificial stimulants, its artificial exercises, and the like: the life of dignified leisure is a life of work; in short, the life of the artist. If other people have talked of the necessity for labor, the dignity of labor, the heroism of labor, these simple Englishmen have discovered the beauty of leisurely work—the simple grace that follows when even the practical arts are pursued as if they were liberal arts. In this utopia the instinct of workmanship, the creative impulse, has free play; and since the majority of people are neither scholars nor scientists, as Sir Thomas More would have had them, they find their fulfillment in adding beauty to all the necessities of their daily toil. Where the work itself leads purely to some useful end, as in the growing of wheat or grass, the joy of work arises out of the comradeship and good-feeling that bind together those who perform it, and the comparative lightness of the tasks that find many hands eager almost to the point of competition to perform them.
One looks at the faces of these people, and the effects of their life are visible. Their women are ten or fifteen years older than we should judge by their appearance; and on every face is written the healthy serenity that follows when people do good work, with a good spirit, in a good place. There is a candor, a plainness, a wholesomeness, an absence of furtive repressions in their every gesture; and as far as men can be satisfied and happy in a good environment, this community is satisfied and happy. There are grumblers, it goes without saying. One of them is a crusty old fellow who has read ancient history and who sighs for the cutthroat practices of the competitive era; and there is another who complains of the tameness of Utopian literature, as compared with that which dealt with the miseries and warped passion of an earlier age.
The only wretchedness in this utopia comes out of the essential human tragedy—the disparity between one’s aims and one’s attainments, between one’s
