A more polished artistry we find in Tennyson; a greater intellectual grip in Browning; a more haunting magic in Rossetti; but for easy mastery over his material and general diffusion of beauty Morris has no superior.

That, apart from the excellent “general diffusion of beauty,” is the kind of conventional criticism that might pass in a paper read to a literary society.  But somehow, in a critic who deliberately writes a book, we look for a greater and more personal mastery of his authors than Mr. Compton-Rickett gives evidence of in the too facile eloquence of these pages.

The most interesting part of the book is that which is devoted to personalia.  But even in the matter of personalia Mr. Cunninghame Graham tells us more vital things in a page of his introduction than Mr. Compton-Rickett scatters through a chapter.  His description of Morris’s appearance, if not a piece of heroic painting, gives us a fine grotesque design of the man: 

His face was ruddy, and his hair inclined to red, and grew in waves like water just before it breaks over a fall.  His beard was of the same colour as his hair.  His eyes were blue and fiery.  His teeth, small and irregular, but white except upon the side on which he hew his pipe, where they were stained with brown.  When he walked he swayed a little, not like (sic) a sailor sways, but as a man who lives a sedentary life toddles a little in his gait.  His ears were small, his nose high and well-made, his hands and feet small for a man of his considerable bulk.  His speech and address were fitting the man; bold, bluff, and hearty....  He was quick-tempered and irritable, swift to anger and swift to reconciliation, and I should think never bore malice in his life.

    When he talked he seldom looked at you, and his hands were always
    twisting, as if they wished to be at work.

Such was the front the man bore.  The ideal for which he lived may be summed up, in Mr. Compton-Rickett’s expressive phrase, as “the democratization of beauty.”  Or it may be stated more humanly in the words which Morris himself spoke at the grave of a young man who died of injuries received at the hands of the police in Trafalgar Square on “Bloody Sunday.”  “Our friend,” he then said: 

Our friend who lies here has had a hard life, and met with a hard death; and, if society had been differently constituted, his life might have been a delightful, a beautiful, and a happy one.  It is our business to begin to organize for the purpose of seeing that such things shall not happen; to try and make this earth a beautiful and happy place.

There you have the sum of all Morris’s teaching.  Like so many fine artists since Plato, he dreamed of a society which would be as beautiful as a work of art.  He saw the future of society as a radiant picture, full of the bright light of hope, as he saw the past of society as a picture steeped in the charming lights of fancy.  He once explained Rossetti’s indifference to politics by saying that he supposed “it needs a person of hopeful mind to take disinterested notice of politics, and Rossetti was certainly not hopeful.”  Morris was the very illuminator of hope.  He was as hopeful a man as ever set out with words and colours to bring back the innocent splendours of the Golden Age.