Download File

150
WILLIAM MORRIS
what was wanted ; they would do what they
were told.
Some feeling of this sort may, I think, be
at the back of Mr. Glutton Brock's peculiar
sympathy with Morris ;
it would explain, too,
why he did less than justice to Shelley in that
remarkable study he published some years ago.
He could not quite forgive the poet for being
so
hopelessly anti-Social. Perhaps, in his
heart, Mr. Brock would hardly admit the
absolute value of aesthetic rapture he wants
;
art to do something for life, and he loses
patience with people who simply add to its
confusion. Shelley, he thought, made a mess
of his own life and of Harriet's, and, for all one
knows, of Miss Kitchener's, and of a score of
others ;
and his poetry you must read for its
own sake or not at all. The poetry of Morris
has value for people who have never known
what it is to feel an aesthetic emotion, and his
life was superbly useful to his fellow-men.
The great State of the future will be glad of
as many William Morrises as it can get.
But it is I who am being less than just now.
From what I have said any one might infer
that I had not read, or had not appreciated,
that volume called " The Defence of Guenevere
and Other Poems," in which are to be
found things of pure beauty, " Summer Dawn,"
" In Prison," " The Wind," " The Haystack