use, before a Europe content in the possession of all that matters.

FOOTNOTE:

[14] "The Flight of the Dragon: an Essay on the Theory and Practice of
Art in China and Japan." By Laurence Binyon. (John Murray.)

WILLIAM MORRIS[15]

[Sidenote: _New Statesman Oct. 1914_]

Here is a book that starts a dozen hares, any one of which would be
worth catching or hunting, at any rate, through a couple of large-type
columns. For a really good book about William Morris is bound to raise
those questions that Morris made interesting and his disciples
fashionable, and that our children, we may hope, will one day make
vital. "How far can society affect art, or art society?" "What might we
have made of machinery and what has machinery made of us?" "Was the
nineteenth century a disaster or only a failure?" These are the
questions that it seems right and natural for a writer who has made
William Morris his peg to discuss; and if I discuss something quite
different it may look as though, forsaking profitable hares, I were
after a herring of my own trailing. Yet, reading this book, I find that
the question that interests me most is: "Why does Clutton Brock tend to
overrate William Morris?" To answer it I have had to discover what sort
of person I suppose Clutton Brock to be, and William Morris to have
been.

Clutton Brock is one of our best critics. When I say this, of course I
take into consideration his unsigned writings, the anonymity of which is
not so strict as to make my judgment indiscreet. Without the subtlety of
a philosopher or a trained dialectician, he has been blest with a
powerful intellect which enables him, unlike most of our critics, not
only to distinguish between sense and nonsense, but himself to refrain
from saying what is utterly absurd. Mr. Brock does not like nonsense,
and he never talks it. Both the form and the content of his criticism
are intellectual. He is in the great English tradition--the tradition of
Dryden and Johnson and Macaulay and Leslie Stephen; he has an
argumentative prose-style and a distaste for highfalutin, and, where the
unenlightened intellectualism of Macaulay and Leslie Stephen, and the
incorrigible common sense of Johnson, might have pitched these eminent
men into the slough of desperate absurdity, it often happens that Mr.
Brock, whose less powerful mind is sweetened by a sense of art,
contrives to escape.

No man who has ever done anything worth doing has done less highfalu