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WILLIAM MORRIS 147
"
William Morris ? To answer it I have had
to discover what
Glutton Brock to
have been.
sort of person I suppose
be, and William Morris to
Glutton Brock is one of our best critics.
When I say this, of course I take into consideration
his unsigned writings, the anonymity
of which is not so strict as to make my
judgment indiscreet. Without the subtlety of
a
philosopher or a trained dialectician, he has
been blest with a powerful
enables him, unlike most of
intellect which
our critics, not
only to distinguish between sense and nonsense,
but himself to refrain from saying what
is utterly absurd. Mr. Brock does not like
nonsense, and he never talks it. Both the
form and the content of his criticism are
intellectual. He is in the great English tradi-
tion the tradition of Dryden and Johnson
and Macaulay and Leslie Stephen he ; has an
argumentative prose-style and a distaste for
highfalutin, and, where the unenlightened intellectualism
of Macaulay and Leslie Stephen,
and the incorrigible common sense of Johnson,
might have pitched these eminent men into the
slough of desperate absurdity, it often happens
that Mr. Brock, whose less powerful mind is
sweetened by a sense of art, contrives to escape.
No man who has ever done anything worth
doing has done less highfalutin than Morris.