XV.—­THE PERSONALITY OF MORRIS

One thinks of William Morris as a man who wished to make the world as beautiful as an illuminated manuscript.  He loved the bright colours, the gold, the little strange insets of landscape, the exquisite craftsmanship of decoration, in which the genius of the medieval illuminators expressed itself.  His Utopia meant the restoration, not so much of the soul of man, as of the selected delights of the arts and crafts of the Middle Ages.  His passion for trappings—­and what fine trappings!—­is admirably suggested by Mr. Cunninghame Graham in his preface to Mr. Compton-Rickett’s William Morris:  a Study in Personality.  Morris he declares, was in his opinion “no mystic, but a sort of symbolist set in a medieval frame, and it appeared to me that all his love of the old times of which he wrote was chiefly of the setting; of tapestries well wrought; of needlework, rich colours of stained glass falling upon old monuments, and of fine work not scamped.”  To emphasize the preoccupation of Morris with the very handiwork, rather than with the mystic secrets, of beauty is not necessarily to diminish his name.  He was essentially a man for whom the visible world existed, and in the manner in which he wore himself out in his efforts to reshape the visible world he proved himself one of the great men of his century.  His life was, in its own way, devotional ever since those years in which Burne-Jones, his fellow-undergraduate at Oxford, wrote to him:  “We must enlist you in this Crusade and Holy Warfare against the age.”  Like all revolutions, of course, the Morris revolution was a prophecy rather than an achievement.  But, perhaps, a prophecy of Utopia is itself one of the greatest achievements of which humanity is capable.

It is odd that one who spilled out his genius for the world of men should have been so self-sufficing, so little dependent on friendships and ordinary human relationships as Morris is depicted both in Mr. Mackail’s biography and Mr. Compton-Rickett’s study.  Obviously, he was a man with whom generosity was a second nature.  When he became a Socialist, he sold the greater part of his precious library in order to help the cause.  On the other hand, to balance this, we have Rossetti’s famous assertion:  “Top”—­the general nickname for Morris—­“never gives money to a beggar.”  Mr. Mackail, if I remember right, accepted Rossetti’s statement as expressive of Morris’s indifference to men as compared with causes.  Mr. Compton-Rickett, however, challenges the truth of the observation.  “The number of ‘beggars,’” he affirms, “who called at his house and went away rewarded were legion.”