with a soft, heavy flop." It seems odd that Mr. John Burns could say of this sensitive and capricious man of genius, as we find him saying in Mr. Compton-Rickett's book, that "William Morris was a chunk of humanity in the rough; he was a piece of good, strong, unvarnished oak-nothing of the elm about him." But we can forgive Mr. Burns's imperfect judgment in gratitude for the sentences that follow :

There is no side of modern life which he has not touched for good. I am sure he would have endorsed heartily the House and Town Planning Act for which I am responsible.

Morris, by the way, would have appreciated Mr. Burns's reference to him as a fellow-craftsman: did he not once himself boast of being "a master artisan, if I may claim that dignity"?

The buoyant life of this craftsman-preacher—whose craftsmanship, indeed, was the chief part of his preaching— who taught the labourers of his age, both by precept and example, that the difference between success and failure in life was the difference between being artisans of loveliness and poor hackworkers of profitable but hideous things-has a unique attractiveness in the history of the latter half of the nineteenth century. He is a figure of whom we cannot be too constantly and vividly reminded. When I took up Mr. Compton-Rickett's book I was full of hope that it would reinterpret for a new generation Morris's evangelistic personality and ideals. Unfortunately, it contains very little of importance that has not already appeared in Mr. Mackail's distinguished biography; and the only interpretation of first-rate interest in the book occurs in the bold imaginative prose of Mr. Cunninghame-Graham's introduction. More than once the author tells us the same things as Mr. Mackail, only in a less life-like way. For example, where Mr. Mackail says of Morris that "by the time he was seven years old he had read all the Waverley novels, and many of Marryat's," Mr. Compton-Rickett vaguely writes: "He was suckled on Romance, and knew his Scott and Marryat

almost before he could lisp their names." That is typical of Mr. Compton-Rickett's method. Instead of contenting himself with simple and realistic sentences like Mr. Mackail's, he aims at-and certainly achieves-a kind of imitative picturesqueness. We again see his taste for the highflown in such a paragraph as that which tells us that "a common bond unites all these men-Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris. They differed in much; but, like great mountains lying apart in the base, they converge high up in the air." The landscape suggested in these sentences is more topsy-turvy than the imagination likes to dwell upon. And the criticisms in the book are seldom lightning-flashes of revelation. For instance:

A more polished artistry we find in Tennyson; a greater intellectual grip in Browning; a more haunting magic in Rossetti; but for easy mastery over his material and general diffusion of beauty Morris has no superior.

That, apart from the excellent "general diffusion of beauty," is the kind of conventional criticism that might pass in a paper read to a literary society. But somehow, in a critic who deliberately writes a book, we look for a greater and more personal mastery of his authors than Mr. Compton-Rickett gives evidence of in the too facile eloquence of these pages.

The most interesting part of the book is that which is devoted to personalia. But even in the matter of personalia Mr. Cunninghame-Graham tells us more vital things in a page of his introduction than Mr. Compton-Rickett scatters through a chapter. His description of Morris's appearance, if not a piece of heroic painting, gives us a fine grotesque design of the man :

His face was ruddy, and his hair inclined to red, and grew in waves like water just before it breaks over a fall. His beard was of the same colour as his hair. His eyes were blue and fiery. His teeth, small and irregular, but white except upon the side on which he held his pipe, where they were stained with brown. When he walked he swayed a little, not like a sailor sways, but as a man who lives a sedentary life toddles a little in his gait. His ears were small, his

nose high and well-made, his hands and feet small for a man of his considerable bulk. His speech and address were fitting the man; bold, bluff, and hearty. . . . He was quick-tempered and irritable, swift to anger and swift to reconciliation, and I should think never bore malice in his life.

When he talked he seldom looked at you, and his hands were always twisting, as if they wished to be at work.

Such was the front the man bore. The ideal for which he lived may be summed up, in Mr. Compton-Rickett's expressive phrase, as "the democratization of beauty." Or it may be stated more humanly in the words which Morris himself spoke at the grave of a young man who died of injuries received at the hands of the police in Trafalgar Square on "Bloody Sunday." "Our friend," he then said:

-our friend who lies here has had a hard life, and met with a hard death; and, if society had been differently constituted, his life might have been a delightful, a beautiful, and a happy one. It is our business to begin to organize for the purpose of seeing that such things shall not happen; to try and make this earth a beautiful and happy place.

There you have the sum of all Morris's teaching. Like so many fine artists since Plato, he dreamed of a society which would be as beautiful as a work of art. He saw the future of society as a radiant picture, full of the bright light of hope, as he saw the past of society as a picture steeped in the charming lights of fancy. He once explained Rossetti's indifference to politics by saying that he supposed "it needs a person of hopeful mind to take disinterested notice of politics, and Rossetti was certainly not hopeful." Morris was the very illuminator of hope. He was as hopeful a man as ever set out with words and colours to bring back the innocent splendours of the Golden Age.

XVI.-GEORGE MEREDITH

(1) The Egoist.

GEORGE MEREDITH, as his friends used to tell one with amusement, was a vain man. Someone has related how, in his later years, he regarded it as a matter of extreme importance that his visitors should sit in a position from which they would see his face in profile. This is symbolic of his attitude to the world. All his life he kept one side of his face hidden. Mr. Ellis, who is the son of one of Meredith's cousins, now takes us for a walk round Meredith's chair. No longer are we permitted to remain in restful veneration of "a god and a Greek." Mr. Ellis invites us-and we cannot refuse the invitation-to look at the other side of the face, to consider the full face and the back of the head. He encourages us to feel Meredith's bumps, and no man whose bumps we are allowed to feel can continue for five minutes the pretence of being an Olympian. He becomes a human being under a criticizing thumb. We discover that he had a genius for imposture, an egoist's temper, and a stomach that fluttered greedily at the thought of dainty dishes. We find all those characteristics that prevented him from remaining on good terms first with his father, next with his wife, and then with his son. At first, when one reads the full story of Meredith's estrangements through three generations, one has the feeling that one is in the presence of an idol in ruins. Certainly, one can never mistake Box Hill for Olympus again. On the other hand, let us but have time to accustom ourselves to see Meredith in other aspects than that which he himself chose to present to his contemporaries-let us begin to see in him not so much one of the world's great comic censors, as one of the world's great comic subjects, and we shall soon find ourselves back

among his books, reading them no longer with tedious awe, but with a new passion of interest in the figure-in-thebackground of the complex human being who wrote them.

For Meredith was his own great subject. Had he been an Olympian he could not have written The Egoist or Harry Richmond. He was an egoist and pretender, coming of a line of egoists and pretenders, and his novels are simply the confession and apology of such a person. Meredith concealed the truth about himself in his daily conversation; he revealed it in his novels. He made such a mystery about his birth that many people thought he was a cousin of Queen Victoria's, or at least a son of Bulwer Lytton's. It was only in Evan Harrington that he told the essentials of the truth about the tailor's shop in Portsmouth above which he was born. Outside his art, nothing would persuade him to own up to the tailor's shop. Once, when Mr. Clodd was filling in a census-paper for him, Meredith told him to put "near Petersfield" as his place of birth. The fact that he was born at Portsmouth was not publicly known, indeed, until some time after his death. And not only was there the tailor's shop to live down, but on his mother's side he was the grandson of a publican, Michael Macnamara. Meredith liked to boast that his mother was "pure Irish "-an exaggeration, according to Mr. Ellis-but he said nothing about Michael Macnamara of "The Vine." At the same time it was the presence not of a bar sinister but of a yardstick sinister in his coat of arms that chiefly filled him with shame. When he was marrying his first wife he wrote "Esquire" in the register as a description of his father's profession. There is no evidence, apparently, as to whether Meredith himself ever served in the tailor's shop after his father moved from Portsmouth to St. James's Street, London. Nothing is known of his life during the two years after his return from the Moravian school at Neuwied. As for his hapless father (who had been trained as a medical student but went into the family business in order to save it from ruin), he did not succeed in London any better than in Portsmouth,