he so often called himself, a craftsman. He had enough masculine
strength to be tidy: that is, after the masculine manner, tidy about his
own trade. If his poems were too like wallpapers, it was because he
really could make wallpapers. He knew that lines of poetry ought to be
in a row, as palings ought to be in a row; and he knew that neither
palings nor poetry looks any the worse for being simple or even severe.
In a sense Morris was all the more creative because he felt the hard
limits of creation as he would have felt them if he were not working in
words but in wood; and if he was unduly dominated by the mere
conventions of the mediævals, it was largely because they were (whatever
else they were) the very finest fraternity of free workmen the world is
ever likely to see.

The very things that were urged against Morris are in this sense part of
his ethical importance; part of the more promising and wholesome turn he
was half unconsciously giving to the movement of modern art. His hazier
fellow-Socialists blamed him because he made money; but this was at
least in some degree because he made other things to make money: it was
part of the real and refreshing fact that at last an æsthete had
appeared who could make something. If he was a capitalist, at least he
was what later capitalists cannot or will not be--something higher than
a capitalist, a tradesman. As compared with aristocrats like Swinburne
or aliens like Rossetti, he was vitally English and vitally Victorian.
He inherits some of that paradoxical glory which Napoleon gave
reluctantly to a nation of shopkeepers. He was the last of that nation;
he did not go out golfing: like that founder of the artistic shopman,
Samuel Richardson, "he kept his shop, and his shop kept him." The
importance of his Socialism can easily be exaggerated. Among other
lesser points, he was not a Socialist; he was a sort of Dickensian
anarchist. His instinct for titles was always exquisite. It is part of