ABSTRACT
Dreams are apt to be capricious and disappointing. They turn from summer to winter, from comedy to tragedy, from exultation to despair, in the twinkling of a bedpost. We cannot complain, then, when Mr. Morris's Dream ofJohn Ballsuddenly changes from a romance into a lecture; yet we cannot but deplore the transformation. For the romance is charming, the lecture commonplace. A statement of economic history from a Socialist point of view is not rendered more luminous or more impressive by being couched in the form of a prophecy, and punctuatedwith exclamations ofsurprise. To those who are already familiar with this interpretation of events, Mr. Morris's ShOTt History of the English People is simply dull. r-rhose, on the other hand, to whom the doctrine is new, will scarcely find it clear or convincing. A plain and ordered statement would serve their purposes better. But the romance-ah, that is a different affair! So far as it goes, it is full of the vision and the faculty divine. Nothing can be simpler than its matter. The dreamer dreams himself in a Kentish village on a summer afternoon, five hundred years ago. Standing at the market cross, he hears the hedge-priest John Ball, newly freed from the Archbishop's prison at Canterbury, address the insurgent peasantry, attributing the ills of the time to 'cruel men fearing not, and kind men daring not, and wise men caring not, and the saints in heaven forbearing.' The speech is interrupted by the approach of a body of arbalestiers and men-at-arms, headed by the sheriff and certain knights. The peasants, among whom are many doughty longbowmen, prepare to receive them warmly, and, after a sharp tussle, come offvictorious. The dead are carried to the village church, while the living prepare for
their march towards London on the morrow; and throughout the summer night, John Ball and the dreamer keep watch in the chancel beside the bodies offriend and foe. It is now that the dream turns into a prophetic lecture accepted by John Ball as a message from 'the King's Son ofHeaven.' The moon sets and the sun rises, and thus the dreamer ends his prophecy:-
Nothing can be more delightful than Mr. Morris's picture of the Kentish hamlet, nor anything morevivid, in the midst ofits dreamlikeness, than his description of the battle. In prose, no less than in poetry, Mr. Morris has a genius for suggesting beautiful things. His prose, if not quite regular according to composition-book rules, is a strong and supple literary instrument. He treats language as a plastic material, to be kneaded, not chiselled or cast. We can plainly trace the influence, every here and there, ofthe sagamen whom Mr. Morris has studied so lovingly. The book, too, is not without a touch ofhis poetic quality, in the shape of a spirited song sung by the Kentish yeomen, with the refrain:
'As they sang,' writes the dreamer, 'a picture of the wild woods passed by me, as they were indeed, no park like dainty glades and lawns, but rough and tangled thicket and bare waste and heath, solemn under the morning sun, and dreary with the rising of the evening wind and the drift of the night-long rain.'
