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148
WILLIAM MORRIS
He was always the craftsman who kept close
to his material, and thought more about the
block and the chisel than about aesthetic
ecstasy. The thrills and ecstasies of life, he
seems to have felt, must come as by-products
out of doing one's job as well as one could :
they were not things, he thought, to aim at,
or even talk about overmuch. I do not agree
with Morris, but that is beside the point.
The is point that Glutton Brock is unwilling
to disagree with him violently. He has a
peculiar kindness for Morris that does not
surprise me. He is a man who works for his
living, and does his work so well that we may
be sure he wins from it delight. The greater
part of what he writes he does not sign ;
and
there are thousands of people in England
who, though they hardly know his name, have
yet been affected by his mind. As he sits
quietly producing a surprising quantity of
good literature, he must sometimes feel very
near those anonymous craftsmen of the Middle
Ages who, lost in the scaffolding, struck out
forms that would to-day make only too
familiar the names of their creators. At
such moments, can
to the man who
he be less
understood
than partial
so well the
greatness and the dignity of those nameless
artists ?
Morris was amongst the first to perceive