GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



things, we owe the movement to preserve, rather than to restore, 

 old buildings. 



In 1877 the idea materialized into the " Society for the Pro- 

 tection of Ancient Buildings," popularly known as " The Anti- 

 Scrape," a word of Morris's own coinage. From that time it did, 

 quietly and unostentatiously, much work of inestimable value, 

 counting among its working members many enthusiastic and 

 promising young architects keen to protect the " sacred monu- 

 ments," as Morris deemed them, of " the nation's growth and 

 hope." Some of these were among the first to answer the call to 

 the colours, and crossing the Channel at the beginning of the 

 European War in August, 1914, they had the exquisite pain of 

 witnessing, with their own eyes, the ruthless and wanton destruction 

 in Belgium and France, of many of the noblest memorials of mediae- 

 val architectural genius. But their work at home has merely 

 been postponed, for I feel sure that " The Anti- Scrape " has 

 still a future before it in the happy day, so certainly coming, 

 when the arts of peace shall emerge from the horrid welter of 

 war. 



But above and beyond aught else, William Morris was a great 

 and original genius in all the arts that are decoratively applicative 

 to domestic life. 



Poet, dreamer, social reformer all this he was but as Mr. 

 Mackail well says, speaking at the moment of his poetry 1 ' the 

 faculty of design in its highest form was the quality in which 

 Morris's unique strength lay," and the remark is even more ap- 

 plicable to his art than to his verse. 



I do not think with Mr. Clutton-Brock, the author of a charming 

 monograph on " William Morris's Work and Influence," that the 

 latter made itself widely felt on the Continent. Though he 

 passionately admired the French Gothic (the first intense pleasure 

 of his life was his introduction to Rouen Cathedral), yet he himself 

 was essentially English in all he thought and did, and the almost 

 severe simplicity of effect at which he aimed in much of the work 

 he produced, was alien to the genius and sentiment of the Latin 

 races : it certainly was entirely opposed, in its orderly restraint, 

 to the prevailing taste of Germany, as shown in the heavy, florid, 

 rococo decoration that I remember to have hated a dozen years 

 ago in Berlin, and elsewhere. 



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