Can you afford to do slipshod, evasive, hypocritical work?  Can you afford to shirk, or make-believe or practise pretense in any act of life?  No, no; for all the time you are molding yourself into a deformity, and drifting away from the Divine.  What the world does and says about you is really no matter, but what you think and what you do are questions vital as Fate.  No one can harm you but yourself.  Work is for the worker.  And so I will answer the questions of the critics as to how society has been benefited by, say, a William Morris book: 

1.  The workmen who made it found a pride and satisfaction in their work.

2.  They received a goodly reward in cash for their time and efforts.

3.  The buyers were pleased with their purchase, and received a decided satisfaction in its possession.

4.  Readers of the book were gratified to see their author clothed in such fitting and harmonious dress.

5.  Reading the text has instructed some, and possibly inspired a few to nobler thinking.

After “The Defense of Guinevere” was published, it was thirteen years before Morris issued another volume.  His days had been given to art and the work of management.  But now the business had gotten on to such a firm basis that he turned the immediate supervision over to others, and took two days of the week, Saturday and Sunday, for literature.

Taking up the active work of literature when thirty-nine years of age, he followed it with the zest of youth for over twenty years—­until death claimed him.  William Morris thought literature should be the product of the ripened mind—­the mind that knows the world of men and which has grappled with earth’s problems.  He also considered that letters should not be a profession in itself—­to make a business of an art is to degrade it.  Literature should be the spontaneous output of the mind that has known and felt.  To work the mine of spirit as a business and sift its product for hire, is to overwork the vein and palm off slag for sterling metal.  Shakespeare was a theater-manager, Milton a secretary, Bobby Burns a farmer, Lamb a bookkeeper, Wordsworth a government employee, Emerson a lecturer, Hawthorne a custom-house inspector, and Whitman a clerk.  William Morris was a workingman and a manufacturer, and would have been Poet Laureate of England had he been willing to call himself a student of sociology instead of a socialist.  Socialism itself (whatever it may be) is not offensive—­the word is.

* * * * *

The great American Apostle of Negation expressed, once upon a day, a regret that he had not been consulted when the Universe was being planned, otherwise he would have arranged to make good things catching instead of bad.

The remark tokened a slight lesion in the logic of the Apostle, for good things are now, and ever have been, infectious.