ng of physical fibre,
after a life of enormous productivity and restless energy, made itself
felt. But these were only incidental causes. What began to weigh upon
him was the thought of all the toiling thousands of humanity, whose
lives of labour precluded them from the enjoyment of all or nearly all
of the beautiful things that were to him the very essence of life;
and, what was worse still, he perceived that the very faculty of higher
enjoyment was lacking, the instinct for beauty having been atrophied
and almost eradicated by sad inheritance, He saw that not only did the
workers not feel the joyful love of art and natural beauty, but that
they could not have enjoyed such pleasures, even if they were to be
brought near to them; and then came the further and darker thought, that
modern art was, after all, a hollow and a soulless thing. He saw around
him beautiful old houses like his own, old churches which spoke of a
high natural instinct for fineness of form and detail. These things
seemed to stand for a widespread and lively joy in simple beauty which
seemed to have vanished out of the world. In ancient times it was
natural to the old builders if they had, say, a barn to build, to make
it strong and seemly and graceful; to buttress it with stone, to bestow
care and thought upon coign and window-ledge and dripstone, to prop the
roof on firm and shapely beams, and to cover it with honest stone tiles,
each one of which had an individuality of its own. But now he saw that
if people built naturally, they ran up flimsy walls of brick, tied them
together with iron rods, and put a curved roof of galvanised iron on the
top. It was bad enough that it should be built so, but what was worse
still was that no one saw or heeded the difference; they thought the
new style was more convenient, and the question of beauty never entered
their minds at all. They remorselessly pulled down, or patched meanly
and sordidly, the old work. And thus he began to feel that modern
art was an essentially artificial thing, a luxury existing for a few
leisurely people, and no longer based on a deep universal instinct.
He thought that art was wounded to death by competition and hurry and
vulgarity and materialism, and that it must die down altogether before a
sweet natural product could arise from the stump.

Then, too, Morris was not an individualist; he cared, one may think,
about things more than people. A friend of his once complained that, if
he