KELMSCOTT HOUSE 
of a large section of the Socialist League of which he had been 
the moving spirit, seceded from it, together with some of his 
personal friends and neighbours, and formed an independent 
branch called the ‘‘ Hammersmith Socialist Society,” the object 
of which was to spread the principles of Socialism peacefully. 
The meetings took place twice a week until, some time after Morris’s 
death, the affair came to a natural ending. They were held in 
the large room built out of the stable and coach-house in which 
he had first set up the carpet looms, on which were woven under 
his immediate eye, the beautiful Hammersmith carpets. 
Until his removal to Merton Abbey, Morris was not able to 
weave carpets larger than twelve feet square, for the space at his 
disposal did not allow it. He designed them entirely himself, begin- 
ning as one does in setting to work on a picture, by making a small, 
careful design—in his case to be enlarged by assistants on point 
paper, divided into minute spaces, each representing a particular 
bit of the carpet, or the proposed painting. The designs he coloured 
carefully himself. When finished he sometimes spread the carpet 
out on the lawn at Kelmscott House, in order that he might judge 
properly of the effect. The drawing at the opening of this chapter 
shows on the right the red-tiled roof of the apartment in which 
the carpet looms were set up. , 
Everybody knows Morris’s famous rule, ‘‘ Have nothing in 
your house that you do not know to be useful, and believe to be 
beautiful.”” He could quite conscientiously stretch it to include 
not alone carpets and embroidery, and wall-paper and stained 
glass, and metal work, but tapestry also; and he did so, for when 
he had mastered one art, he immediately hungered to wrestle with 
another ; and by and by he set up a tapestry loom as well as a carpet 
loom—the first tapestry loom being that which, as we have seen, 
he put up in his own bedroom at Hammersmith. His ambition 
was to revive the splendid and famous Flemish and French tapestries 
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Arras, round which at 
this very moment, the middle of April, 1917, surges the tide of 
the most terrible war in history, was in the earlier part of the 
fifteenth century the centre of the peaceful industry, and from it 
wall-hangings came to be known as “ Arras.” Other Flemish 
cities, notably Brussels, soon surpassed Arras in the manufacture. 
The greatest artists of the time designed for them, indeed the 
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