IX
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I ot remember who first brought me to the old stable beside Kelmscott House, William Morris house at Hammersmith, & to the debates held there upon Sunday evenings by the socialist League. I was soon of the little group who had supper with Morris afterwards. I met at these suppers very stantly Walter e, Emery Walker presently, in association with Cobden Sanderson, the printer of many fine books, and less stantly Bernard Shaw and Cockerell, now of the museum of Cambridge, and perhaps but once or twice Hyndman the socialist and the anarchist Prince Krapotkin. There too one always met certain more or less educated workmen, rough of speed manner, with a vi to meet every turn. I was told by one of them, on a night when I had done perhaps more than my share of the talking, that I had talked more nonsense in one evening than he had heard in the whole course of his past life. I had merely preferred Parnell, then at the height of his career, to Michael Davitt who had wrecked his Irish influence by interna<var>藏书网</var>tional politics. We sat round a long unpolished and unpairestle table of new wood in a room where hung Rossettis Pomegranate, a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and where one wall and part of the ceiling were covered by a great Persian carpet. Morris had said somewhere or other that carpets were meant for people who took their shoes off when they entered a house, and were most in place upon a tent floor. I was a little disappointed in the house, for Morris was an old man tent at last to gather beautiful things rather than te a beautiful house. I saw the drawing?room once or twid there alone all my sense of decoration, founded upon the background of Rossettis pictures, was satisfied by a big cupboard painted with a se from Chaucer by Burne Jones, but even there were objects, perhaps a chair or a little table, that seemed actal, bought hurriedly perhaps, and with little thought, to make wife or daughter fortable. I had read as a boy in books belonging to my father, the third volume of The Eart９9ｌｉｂ?hly Paradise and The Defence of Guinevere, which pleased me less, but had not opeher for a long time. The man who never laughed again had seemed the most wonderful of tales till my father had accused me of preferring Morris to Keats, got angry about it and put me altogether out of tenance. He had spoiled my pleasure, for now I questioned while I read and at last ceased to read; nor had Morris written as yet those prose romahat became, after his death, so great a joy that they were the only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not e too quickly to the end. It wasnow Morris himself that stirred my i, and I took to him first because of some little tricks of speed body that reminded me of my old grandfather in Sligo, but soon discovered his spoy and joy and made him my chief of men. To?day I do not set his poetry very high, but for an odd altogether wonderful line, or thought; a, if some angel offered me the choice, I would choose to live his life, poetry and all, rat></a>her than my own or any other mans. A reprodu of his portrait by Watts hangs over my mantlepiece with Henleys, and those of other friends. Its grave wide?open eyes, like the eyes of some dreami, remind me of the open eyes of Titians Ariosto, while the broad vigorous body suggests a mind that has no need of the intelleain sahough it give itself to every phantasy, the dreamer of the middle ages. It is the fool of fairy ... wide and wild as a hill, the resolute European image that yet half remembers Buddhas motionless meditation, and has no trait in on with the wavering, lean image of hungry speculation, that ot but fill the minds eye because of certain famous Hamlets of our stage. Shakespeare himself foreshadowed a symbolic ge, that shows a ge in the whole temperament of the world, for though he called his Hamlet fat, and st of breath, he thrust between his fingers agile rapier and dagger.The dream world of Morris was as much the antithesis of daily life as with other men of genius, but he was never scious of the antithesis and so knew nothing of intellectual suffering. His intellect, unexhausted by speculation or casuistry, was wholly at the service of hand and eye, and whatever he pleased he did with an unheard of ease and simplicity, and if style and vocabulary were at times monotonous, he could not have made them otherwise without ceasing to be himself. Instead of the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare, its fresh from field and market, if the woof were learned, his age offered him a speech, exhausted from abstra, that only returo <s>藏书网</s>its full vitality when written learnedly and slowly. The roots of his antithetical dream were visible enough: a never idle man of great physical strength aremely irascible??did he not fling a badly baked plum pudding through the window upon Xmas Day???a man more joyous than any intellectual man of our world, called himself the idle singer of ay day created new forms of melancholy, and faint persons, like the knights & ladies of Burne Jones, who are never, no, not on forty volumes, put out of temper. A blunderer, who had said to the only unverted man at a socialist pii Dublin, to prove that equality came easy, I was brought up a gentleman and now, as you see, associate with all sorts, a wounds thereby that rankled after twenty years, a man of whom I have heard it said He is always afraid that he is doing something wrong, and generally is, wrote long stories with apparently no other object than that his persons might show one ahrough situations of poignant difficulty, the most exquisite tact.
He did not project, like Henley or like Wilde, an image of himself, because, having all his <u></u>imaginatio on making and doing, he had little self?knowledge. He imagined instead new ditions of making and doing; and, ieeth of those stifieralisations that cowed my boyhood, I see some like imagining in every great ge, believing that the first flying fish leaped, not because it sought adaptation to the air, but out of horror of the sea.
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