CHAPTER V
HIS COMRADESHIP: TRAITS AND INCIDENTS
Mr. Mackail and other writers speak of Morris' dislike to going into society or taking part in the usual amenities of social intercourse. He lived, even as he worked, in his own way, heeding very little the conventionalities of his class or profession. This peculiarity has been noted as being a rather singular characteristic in one who laid so much emphasis on neighbourliness and mutual aid, and who enunciated the axiom that 'Fellowship is life and lack of fellowship is death,' and there are those who discover in his behaviour indications of an unsocial trait in his nature, a disposition of aloofness towards his fellows.
Therein, I think, Morris is misunderstood. I cannot, of course, speak of him from such familiar acquaintance as many of his older and more intimate friends enjoyed, but so far as my own knowledge of him during the last ten years of his life goes, I should say that instead of being in any degree of an unsocial or seclusive disposition, he was preeminently companionable by nature. I find also that in the biographies of Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Swinburne, and other of his more celebrated associates, he invariably figures as a delightful, even if sometimes a somewhat unmanageable, companion—always he is the leading spirit in the conversation and fun of their gatherings. True he displayed intense self-willedness so far as concerned his own ways of life and his work, and demanded a good deal of home seclusion when preoccupied with his writing and his art schemes. His
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