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 
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