KELMSCOTT HOUSE 
it, and in due time finished it, turning neither to the right hand 
nor the left till it was done. So I did with all things I set my hand 
to.” 
It was in this way that, when under Rossetti’s influence, he 
at one time had resolved to become a painter—but soon, as we have 
seen, gave up the idea, finding that not in that line lay his genius. 
In his subsequent career as a decorative artist and craftsman, 
everything done in his workshops was tested, tried, and examined 
by himself; whether carpet-weaving, tapestry-weaving, chintzes, 
wall-paper, or stained ‘glass. His chintzes were primarily intended 
for wall-hangings, to be used instead of paper—but people would 
not have them. 
His industry and consequent output, were astonishing. Seventy 
or eighty designs for wall-papers, and nearly forty for chintzes, 
were produced by him during the years he was in business. Woven 
stuffs, and stamped velvets, silk damasks, carpets and tapestries, 
occupied him in turn. “ He carried on his business as a manu- 
facturer,”’ says Mr. Mackail, ‘“‘ not because he wanted to make 
money, but because he wanted to make the things he manufac- 
tured . . . in every manual art which he touched he was a skilled 
expert ; in the art of money-making he remained to the last an 
amateur.” 
A great painter once said to me, when sitting before an unfinished 
picture on my easel—and gazing with kind eyes thoughtfully at it, 
‘ Ah, Jessie, an artist’s greatest reward in his work, is his pleasure 
in the doing of it.””, The words sank into my mind, and I have never 
forgotten them. 
To Morris all work was pleasure; one of his dicta being that 
“no work that cannot be done with pleasure in the doing, is worth 
doing,” which is only another way of saying, less comprehensively, 
that the work can not be well done unless the worker’s heart be 
in it. The aphorism is broadly true, but must be accepted with 
modification ; it applies of course in a special manner to the Arts, 
to craftsmanship, to literature, to scientific research, to inventions, 
to the instruction of youth—and in short to avocations innumerable 
—wherever brain power, skill, initiative, and perseverance, are 
essential to achievement. But it is obvious that the dustman, the 
scavenger and the sweep, for example, can find no positive pleasure 
in their occupations, yet they are hygienic and necessary, and 
287 
