Then, too, Morris was not an individualist; he cared, one may think, about things more than people.  A friend of his once complained that, if he were to die, Morris would no doubt grieve for him and even miss him, but that it would make no gap in his life, nor interrupt his energy of work.  He cared for movements, for classes, for groups of men, more than he cared for persons.  And thus the idea came to him, in a mournful year of reflection, that it was not only a mistake, but of the nature of sin, to isolate himself in a little Paradise of art of his own making, and to allow the great noisy, ugly, bewildered world to go on its way.  It was a noble grief.  The thought of the bare, uncheered, hopeless lives of the poor came to weigh on him like an obsession, and he began to turn over in his mind what he could do to unravel the knotted skein.

“I am rather in a discouraged mood,” he wrote on New Year’s Day 1880, “and the whole thing seems almost too tangled to see through and too heavy to move.”  And again: 

“I have of late been somewhat melancholy (rather too strong a word, but I don’t know another); not so much so as not to enjoy life in a way, but just so much as a man of middle age who has met with rubs (though less than his share of them) may sometimes be allowed to be.  When one is just so much subdued one is apt to turn more specially from thinking of one’s own affairs to more worthy matters; and my mind is very full of the great change which I hope is slowly coming over the world.”

And so he plunged into Socialism.  He gave up his poetry and much of his congenial work.  He attended meetings and committees; he wrote leaflets and pamphlets; he lavished money; he took to giving lectures and addresses; he exposed himself to misunderstandings and insults.  He spoke in rain at street corners to indifferent loungers; he pushed a little cart about the squares selling Socialist literature; he had collisions with the police; he was summoned before magistrates:  the “poetic upholsterer,” as he was called, became an object of bewildered contempt to friends and foes alike.  The work was not congenial to him, but he did it well, developing infinite tolerance and good-humour, and even tactfulness, in his relations with other men.  The exposure to the weather, the strain, the neglect of his own physical needs, brought on, undoubtedly, the illness of which he eventually died; and worst of all was the growing shadow of discouragement, which made him gradually aware that the times were not ripe, and that even if the people could seize the power they desired, they could not use it.  He became aware that the worker’s idea of rising in the social scale was not the idea of gaining security, leisure, independence, and love of honest work, but the hope of migrating to the middle class, and becoming a capitalist on a small scale.  That was the last thing that Morris desired.  Most of all he felt the charge of inconsistency that was dinned into his ears.  It was held ridiculous that a wealthy capitalist and a large employer of labour, living, if not in luxury, at least in considerable stateliness, should profess Socialist ideas without attempting to disencumber himself of his wealth.  He wrote in answer to a loving remonstrance: