Mr. Belfort Bax declares that he kept a drawerful of half-crowns for foreign anarchists, because, as he explained apologetically:  “They always wanted half-a-crown, and it saved time to have a stock ready.”

But this is no real contradiction of Rossetti.  Morris’s anarchists represented his life’s work to him.  He did not help them from that personal and irrational charity which made Rossetti want to give a penny to a beggar in the street.  This may be regarded as a supersubtle distinction; but it is necessary if we are to understand the important fact about Morris that—­to quote Mr. Compton-Rickett—­“human nature in the concrete never profoundly interested him.”  Enthusiastic as were the friendships of his youth—­when he gushed into “dearests” in his letters—­we could imagine him as living without friends and yet being tolerably happy.  He was, as Mr. Compton-Rickett suggests, like a child with a new toy in his discovery of ever-fresh pursuits in the three worlds of Politics, Literature and Art.  He was a person to whom even duties were Pleasures.  Mr. Mackail has spoken of him as “the rare distance of a man who, without ever once swerving from truth or duty, knew what he liked and did what he liked, all his life long.”  One thinks of him in his work as a child with a box of paints—­an inspired child with wonderful paints and the skill to use them.  He was such a child as accepts companions with pleasure, but also accepts the absence of companions with pleasure.  He could absorb himself in his games of genius anywhere and everywhere.  “Much of his literary work was done on buses and in trains.”  His poetry is often, as it were, the delightful nursery-work of a grown man.  “His best work,” as Mr. Compton-Rickett says, “reads like happy improvisations.”  He had a child’s sudden and impulsive temper, too.  Once, having come into his studio in a rage, he “took a flying kick at the door, and smashed in a panel.”  “It’s all right,” he assured the scared model, who was preparing to fly; “it’s all right—­something had to give way.”  The same violence of impulse is seen in the story of how, on one occasion, when he was staying in the country, he took an artistic dislike to his hostess’s curtains, and tore them down during the night.  His judgments were often much the same kind of untempered emotions as he showed in the matter of the curtains—­his complaint, for example, that a Greek temple was “like a table on four legs:  a damned dull thing!” He was a creature of whims:  so much so that, as a boy, he used to have the curse, “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,” flung at him.  He enjoyed the expression of knock-out opinions such as:  “I always bless God for making anything so strong as an onion!” He laughed easily, not from humour so much as from a romping playfulness.  He took a young boy’s pleasure in showing off the strength of his mane of dark brown hair.  He would get a child to get hold of it, and lift him off the ground by it “with no apparent inconvenience.”