20 THOMPSON YATES LABORATORIES REPORT 
had walked through the sleepy town from the landing stage. We passed, I remember, a nurse 
and two children, a woman carrying clothes, two boys fighting, a sentinel on guard ; and then we 
stood on the terrace of the Castle, with the blue water of the Sound at our side. What illusions 
seemed the people we had passed : even the soldier on guard ! For was not Hamlet there 
following his father's ghost until it disappeared over the north end of the Terrace, while Horatio 
and Marcellus stood terrified beside us ; and then did not the whole terrible tragedy seize upon us ? 
Did not the King, the Queen, Polonius and Ophelia, and Hamlet himself, meet their fated ends ? 
Was not this Reality ? Were not these the real people, the men and women who interest us and 
teach us and inspire us, and who are, in a word, eternal ? ' The things which are seen are 
temporal, the things which are not seen are eternal.' Or to put the same thought into another 
form : ' " Horace and Virgil," said Lord Runcorn, rising and moving meditatively towards the 
window, though still talking to Mrs. Norham, "are our familiar friends to-day, whilst consuls and 
triumvirs are remembered only by Undergraduates, and remembered by them only till they have 
deposited their memories on their examination papers." ' Yes ! Mind, when incorporated in the 
ideal creations of Genius, becomes part of the Eternal. 
William Morris was a considerable poet. He was also in other ways a considerable artist. 
Architect, I think, he liked to call himself, including in the word the making of every beautiful or 
useful commodity which could make life more worthy to be lived. He wished in fact to be the 
builder up of a new world, the redeemer of our present society from that state of ugliness which 
commercial competition and capitalist government had, he thought, brought about ; to form a 
world in which there would be no rich and no poor, no cowardice, no tyranny. Division of 
labour, as we know it, must cease ; each man must have room and time to produce mentally and 
physically what was best, or rather what he, the individual, could best produce. He must have 
time to think about what he was doing, and a leading voice in the processes of production. 
Morris hated the crowded ugliness of the rich man's drawing-room just as much as he disliked 
the bare walls and cheap furniture of the poor man's parlour. ' I have at least,' he wrote, ' respect 
for the dweller in the Tub of Diogenes ; indeed I don't look upon it as so bad a house after all. 
I have seen worse houses to be let at ^joo a year.' 
And as he followed on his train of thouglit he became, and called himself, a Socialist, and 
then, having become one, he with some na'ivcte tells us how he began to read works on the 
Economics of Socialism, by whose help he might prove the truth of his position. When his 
taste and his feelings had carried him away he began to ask reason to prove them right. ' It was 
only,' I quote from Mr. Mackail, 'after years of disappointment that he realized that the time 
had not yet come. But his whole life bore witness to the sincerity and self-sacrificing devotion 
with which he followed the patli he conceived to be that of his highest duty. For, after all, what 
is the true end and aim of all politics and all commerce ? Is it not to bring about a state of 
things in which all men live at peace and free from over-burdensome anxiety, provided with work 
which is pleasant to them and producing results useful to their neighbours ' ? Now, curiously 
enough, and it may seem paradoxical, I came away from the reading of his Life with this 
impression : that a better Individualist never lived than was William Morris himself. What 
