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154
WILLIAM MORRIS
can help liking him. He had that magnanimity
which makes people take instinctively
the right side. His reasons might be
wrong, but he was in the right. There are
people in history, and Morris is one of them,
about whom we feel that if they were alive
they would sympathize with whatever were
the best and most pressing aspirations
of the
age. Morris would, of course, be as firm to-day
as ever against plutocracy, but one feels sure
that he would take his stand with those who
are trying to win for themselves some kind of
moral and intellectual as well as economic
freedom. One feels sure he would be of that
forlorn hope of civilization that carries on a
sporadic and ineffective war against officialism
and militarism on the one hand, and puritanism
and superstition on the other. One feels sure
that, however little he might like new developments
in art or thought, he would be against
the people who tried to suppress them. One
feels quite sure that he would never cease to
believe that so long as society is imperfect
it is the right and duty of individuals to
experiment. The fact is, Morris was at once
a practical craftsman and an idealist. In
practical affairs and private prejudices he
could be as truculent and wrong-headed as the
rest of us ; but he was always conscious of
something much more important than practical