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WILLIAM MORRIS 151
in the Floods " ; any one might suppose that
I did not know " Love is Enough." These
are the poems which, with " Sigurd," give
William Morris his place amongst the poets.
Mr. Glutton Brock feels this surely enough,
because he possesses, besides intellect, that
other and rarer critical faculty, that spiritual
tuning-fork by which a fine critic distinguishes
between emotion and sentimentality, between
rhetoric and rant. It is because Mr. Brock
possesses this peculiar sensibility part aesthetic,
part ethical, and part intellectual, it seems
that he can be trusted to detect and dislike
even the subtlest manifestations of that
quality which most distinguishes Tennyson
from Morris, Kipling from Walt Whitman,
and the Bishop of London from the Vicar of
Wakefield. That is why I suppose Mr. Brock
to be one of our best critics.
If there were anything fundamentally nasty
about Morris Mr. Brock would not be inclined
to overrate him. Mr. Brock pardons no
horrors : there are none here to
unpardonable
pardon. But he overrates, or rather overmarks,
William Morris as a scrupulous but
soft-hearted examiner might overmark a
sympathetic pupil. He never gives marks
when the answer is wrong, but he gives a great
many when it is : right and he is a little blind
to deficiencies. He does not make it clear