people who do not work to live,
but live to do what they consider their own peculiar piece of work? Now,
if only they were craftsmen, they would make what was wanted; they
would do what they were told.

Some feeling of this sort may, I think, be at the back of Mr. Clutton
Brock's peculiar sympathy with Morris; it would explain, too, why he did
less than justice to Shelley in that remarkable study he published some
years ago. He could not quite forgive the poet for being so hopelessly
anti-Social. Perhaps, in his heart, Mr. Brock would hardly admit the
absolute value of aesthetic rapture; he wants art to do something for
life, and he loses patience with people who simply add to its confusion.
Shelley, he thought, made a mess of his own life and of Harriet's, and,
for all one knows, of Miss Hitchener's, and of a score of others; and
his poetry you must read for its own sake or not at all. The poetry of
Morris has value for people who have never known what it is to feel an
aesthetic emotion, and his life was superbly useful to his fellow-men.
The great State of the future will be glad of as many William Morrises
as it can get.

But it is I who am being less than just now. From what I have said any
one might infer that I had not read, or had not appreciated, that volume
called "The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems," in which are to be
found things of pure beauty, "Summer Dawn," "In Prison," "The Wind,"
"The Haystack in the Floods"; any one might suppose that I did not know
"Love is Enough." These are the poems which, with "Sigurd," give William
Morris his place amongst the poets. Mr. Clutton Brock feels this surely
enough, because he possesses, besides intellect, that other and rarer
critical faculty, that spiritual tuning-fork by which a fine critic
distinguishes between emotion and sentimentality, between rhetoric and
rant. It is because Mr. Brock possesses this peculiar sensibility--part
aesthetic, part ethical, and part intellectual, it seems--that he can be
trusted to detect and dislike even the subtlest manifestations of that
quality which most distinguishes Tennyson from Morris, Kipling from Walt
Whitman, and the Bishop of London from the Vicar of Wakefield. That is
why I suppose Mr. Brock to be one of our best critics.

If there were anything fundamentally nasty about Morris Mr. Brock would
not be inclined to overrate him. Mr. Brock pardons no unpardonable
horrors: there are none here to pardon. But he overrat