1889] William Morris 23 



Nor must I omit another influence which was an important one with 

 me that summer in the direction of weaning me from home politics, 

 that of an intimacy which I then for the first time enjoyed with William 

 Morris. I had already for some years known the Morrises, my first 

 acquaintance with them having been begun in 1883, when I met Mrs. 

 Morris at Naworth, having been invited specially for the purpose by 

 Mrs. Howard (Lady Carlisle), and had spent a week there in her 

 company, and we had made friends, but of Morris himself I had as 

 yet seen little except occasionally when I called on them in Hammer- 

 smith. This summer, however, of 1889 saw me for the first time at 

 Kelmscott Manor, where I had an opportunity of intimate intercourse 

 with him during the many pleasant days of gudgeon fishing we enjoyed 

 together on the Upper Thames and the evenings when we argued the 

 questions, artistic and political, which occupied his mind. 



Morris was at that time in a mood of reaction from his socialistic 

 fervour. He had quarrelled with Hyndman, and was disgusted at the 

 personal jealousies of his fellow-workers in the cause and at their 

 cowardice in action. He never got over the pusillanimity they had 

 shown at the Trafalgar Square meeting two years before, when a few 

 hundred policemen had dealt with thousands of them as though they 

 had been schoolboys. Morris was too loyal and too obstinate to abjure 

 his creed, but the heart of his devotion to the cause of the proletariat 

 had gone. In some ways our two positions were the same. We had 

 both of us sacrificed much socially to our principles, and our principles 

 had failed to justify themselves by results, and we were both driven 

 back on earlier loves, art, poetry, romance. Morris, with one who 

 understood him and dared to argue with him boldly, was a delightful 

 companion. He was intolerant of the conventional talk of society, and 

 had little sympathy with ideas foreign to his own. He had little 

 patience with fools, and the prettiest woman in the world could not 

 seduce him into listening to nonsense if there was nothing of fact 

 behind it. His time was too precious to waste on them; and the fine 

 ladies who affected artistic tastes in his company without real knowledge 

 put him straightway to flight. To such he was rude and repellent, but 

 to anyone who could increase his stock of knowledge on any subject he 

 lent a willing ear, whether artist or artisan, with absolute indifference 

 as to his social position. In his domestic life Morris was too busy to 

 be unhappy, and of too sanguine a temperament to worry himself much 

 over past disappointments ; yet disappointments cannot but have been 

 his. He had a strong and affectionate heart, and had centred his home 

 affections on his two children, and the younger, May, had just made 

 an engagement he disapproved, while the elder, Jenny, who had been 

 his pride as a child for her intellectual faculties, had overworked her 

 brain and was now subject to epileptic fits. It was touching now at 



