example of his life, he gave to the world. He taught us as no one ever before the lesson that art was the greatest expression of joy in work and life, and the highest evidence (as I will put it) of man's likeness to, and his worship of, his Creator. In the intensity of this conviction, no less than in the splendour of his example, concerning the high importance of art as a fundamental test of man's real freedom, of democracy, and of civilisation itself, Morris stands out unique among the greatest teachers of the modern world.
Lastly, and inevitably, Morris was a Socialist. He was a Socialist because he could not be William Morris without being a Socialist. His Socialism was not, as some of his admirers have supposed, an incidental occurrence in his life a sort of by-product of his career; it was integral with his genius; it was born and bred in his flesh and bone. He derived his Socialist impulse from no theory or philosophy or reasoning of his intellect, but from his very being. Under no circumstances of life could he ever have been happy in making his fellow-man a slave, or in deriving advantage from his fellows' pain or misery; nor could he have done so at all without being conscious of doing it, for the very nature of him would have perceived the fact through whatever conventions might obscure it. It was simply impossible for him to accept from others any service or gift which he himself was not ready in his heart to give to others even more abundantly if he could.
Fellowship, he said, is life, and lack of fellowship is death; and in saying this he was expressing not a mere judgment of his mind, but what he felt within himself and what he expressed in his art and whole conduct of life.
All these things about Morris I did not, of course, know when I first met him and fixed my youthful homage upon him: indeed, it was not until after his death that the greater qualities of his character and achievement revealed themselves to me. But I felt from my first acquaintance with him, as did so many others, that he
