KELMSCOTT HOUSE 



His may have seemed to some people " the pride that apes 

 humility ! " 



But it was not so ! In his passionate sympathy with the labour- 

 ing poor as a class (he was not interested in them as individuals), 

 he felt himself to be one with them, and he desired to show this 

 to the world at large. For it was his personal possession of beauti- 

 ful things, and his happiness in work, by both of which he felt 

 his own life to be desirable, that awoke in him the altruistic longing 

 to bestow the like upon those who, though themselves unconscious 

 of their degradation were leading lives entirely devoid of sweetness 

 and light, and refinement and education ; many of them being 

 raised but little above the brutes. " He felt ashamed," he said, 

 when he contrasted their lot with his, and the dreary, unrelieved 

 drudgery of their daily labour with his own happy working hours. 

 " As I sit at my work at home, which is at Hammersmith," he 

 said, addressing a school of science and art, " I often hear some 

 of that ruffianism go past the window of which a good deal has 

 been said in the papers of late ... as I hear the yells, and shrieks, 

 and all the degradation cast on the glorious tongue of Shakespeare 

 and Milton, as I see the brutal, reckless faces and figures go past 

 me . . . fierce wrath takes possession of me till I remember, 

 as I hope I mostly do, that it was my good luck to be born re- 

 spectable and rich, that has put me on this side of the window 

 amongst delightful books and lovely works of art, and not on the 

 other side in the empty street, the drink-steeped liquor shop, 

 the foul and degraded lodgings." 



Morris, if he could, would have had erased from the dictionary 

 the dreadful words " rich and poor." Carried away by a sense of 

 the burning injustice and inequality of life, we find that he even 

 faced " the thought " that true civilization may have to be 

 reached through the destruction, and not the transformation of 

 the existing order. Yet it should always be remembered to 

 his credit, when moderate men who love and revere him as an 

 artist, assail him for his violent socialism, that it sprang quite 

 naturally in the beginning out of his noble desire to see other 

 men's lives happier and healthier, and the world they dwell in 

 more beautiful. 



To Morris's keen appreciation of venerable, historic, and beautiful 



283 



