splendour and the miseries of human nature to write well on Shakespeare. Of Fox Mr. Whibley says:

He put no bounds upon his hatred of England, and he thought it not shameful to intrigue with foreigners against the safety and credit of the land to which he belonged. Wherever there was a foe to England, there was a friend of Fox. America, Ireland, France, each in turn inspired his enthusiasm. When Howe was victorious at Brooklyn, he publicly deplored "the terrible news." After Valmy he did not hesitate to express his joy. "No public event," he wrote, "not excepting Yorktown and Saratoga, ever happened that gave me so much delight. I could not allow myself to believe it for some days for fear of disappointment."

It does not seem to occur to Mr. Whibley that in regard to America, Ireland, and France, Fox was, according to the standard of every ideal for which the Allies professed to fight, tremendously right, and that, were it not for Yorktown and Valmy, America and France would not in our own time have been great free nations fighting against the embattled Whibleys of Germany. So far as Mr. Whibley's political philosophy goes, I see no reason why he should not have declared himself on the side of Germany. He believes in patriotism, it is true, but he is apparently a patriot of the sort that loves his country and hates his fellow-countrymen (if that is what he means by "the people," and presumably it must be). Mr. Whibley has the mind of a German professor. His vehemence against the Germans for appreciating Shakespeare is strangely like a German professor's vehemence against the English for not appreciating him. "Why then," he asks,

should the Germans have attempted to lay violent hands upon our Shakespeare? It is but part of their general policy of pillage. Stealing comes as easy to them as it came to Bardolph and Nym, who in Calais stole a fire-shovel. Wherever they have gone they have cast a thievish eye upon what does not belong to them. They hit upon the happy plan of levying tolls upon starved Belgium. It was not enough for their greed to empty a country of food; they must extract something from its pocket, even though it be dying of hunger. . .. No doubt, if they came to these shores, they would feed their fury by

scattering Shakespeare's dust to the winds of heaven. As they are unable to sack Stratford, they do what seems to them the next best thing they hoist the Jolly Roger over Shakespeare's works.

Their arrogance is busy in vain. Shakespeare shall never be theirs. He was an English patriot, who would always have refused to bow the knee to an insolent alien.

This is mere foaming at the mouth-the tawdry violence of a Tory Thersites. This passage is a measure of the good sense and imagination Mr. Whibley brings to the study of Shakespeare. It is simply theatrical Jolly-Rogerism.

XV. THE PERSONALITY OF MORRIS

ONE thinks of William Morris as a man who wished to make the world as beautiful as an illuminated manuscript. He loved the bright colours, the gold, the little strange insets of landscape, the exquisite craftsmanship of decoration, in which the genius of the medieval illuminators expressed itself. His Utopia meant the restoration, not so much of the soul of man, as of the selected delights of the arts and crafts of the Middle Ages. His passion for trappings—and what fine trappings !—is admirably suggested by Mr. Cunninghame-Graham in his preface to Mr. ComptonRickett's William Morris: a Study in Personality. Morris, he gives it as his opinion, was "no mystic, but a sort of symbolist set in a medieval frame, and it appeared to me that all his love of the old times of which he wrote was chiefly of the setting; of tapestries well wrought; of needlework, rich colours of stained glass falling upon old monuments, and of fine work not scamped." To emphasize the preoccupation of Morris with the very handiwork, rather than with the mystic secrets, of beauty is not necessarily to diminish his name. He was essentially a man for whom the visible world existed, and in the manner in which he wore himself out in his efforts to reshape the visible world he proved himself one of the great men of his century. His life was, in its own way, devotional ever since those years in which Burne-Jones, his fellow-undergraduate at Oxford, wrote to him: "We must enlist you in this Crusade and Holy Warfare against the age." Like all revolutions, of course, the Morris revolution was a prophecy rather than an achievement. But, perhaps, a prophecy of Utopia is itself one of the greatest achievements of which humanity is capable.

It is odd that one who spilled out his genius for the

world of men should have been so self-sufficing, so little dependent on friendships and ordinary human relationships as Morris is depicted both in Mr. Mackail's biography and Mr. Compton-Rickett's study. Obviously, he was a man with whom generosity was a second nature. When he became a Socialist, he sold the greater part of his precious library in order to help the cause. On the other hand, to balance this, we have Rossetti's famous assertion: "Top" the general nickname for Morris-" never gives money to a beggar." Mr. Mackail, if I remember right, accepted Rossetti's statement as expressive of Morris's indifference to men as compared with causes. Mr. Compton-Rickett, however, challenges the truth of the observation. "The number of beggars, ," he affirms, "who called at his house and went away rewarded were legion."

Mr. Belfort Bax declares that he kept a drawerful of half-crowns for foreign anarchists, because, as he explained apologetically: "They always wanted half-a-crown, and it saved time to have a stock ready."

But this is no real contradiction of Rossetti. Morris's anarchists represented his life's work to him. He did not help them from that personal and irrational charity which made Rossetti want to give a penny to a beggar in the street. This may be regarded as a supersubtle distinction; but it is necessary if we are to understand the important fact about Morris that to quote Mr. Compton-Rickett"human nature in the concrete never profoundly interested him." Enthusiastic as were the friendships of his youthwhen he gushed into "dearests" in his letters-we could imagine him as living without friends and yet being tolerably happy. He was, as Mr. Compton-Rickett suggests, like a child with a new toy in his discovery of everfresh pursuits in the three worlds of Politics, Literature and Art. He was a person to whom even duties were pleasures. Mr. Mackail has spoken of him as "the rare instance of a man who, without ever once swerving from truth or duty, knew what he liked and did what he liked, all his life long." One thinks of him in his work as a child

with a box of paints-an inspired child with wonderful paints and the skill to use them. He was such a child as accepts companions with pleasure, but also accepts the absence of companions with pleasure. He could absorb himself in his games of genius anywhere and everywhere. "Much of his literary work was done on buses and in trains." His poetry is often simply the delightful nursery-work of a grown man. "His best work," as Mr. Compton-Rickett says, “reads like happy improvizations.” He had a child's sudden and impulsive temper, too. Once, having come into his studio in a rage, he "took a flying kick at the door, and smashed in a panel. "It's all right," he assured the scared model, who was preparing to fly; "it's all right-something had to give way." The same violence of impulse is seen in the story of how, on one occasion, when he was staying in the country, he took an artistic dislike to his hostess's curtains, and tore them down during the night. His judgments were often much the same kind of intemperate emotions as he showed in the matter of the curtains-his complaint, for example, that a Greek temple was "like a table on four legs: a damned dull thing!" He was a creature of whims: so much so that, as a boy, he used to have the curse, "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel," flung at him. He enjoyed the expression of knock-out opinions such as: "I always bless God for making anything so strong as an onion !" He laughed easily, not from humour so much as from a romping playfulness. He took a young boy's pleasure in showing off the strength of his mane of dark brown hair. He would get a child to catch hold of it, and lift him off the ground by it "with no apparent inconvenience." He was at the same time nervous and restless. He was given to talking to himself; his hands were never at peace; "if he read aloud, he punched his own head in the exuberance of his emotions." Possibly there was something high-strung even about his play, as when, Mr. Mackail tells us, "he would imitate an eagle with considerable skill and humour, climbing on to a chair and, after a sullen pause, coming down