ackail's
biography and Mr. Compton-Rickett's study. Obviously, he was a man with
whom generosity was a second nature. When he became a Socialist, he sold
the greater part of his precious library in order to help the cause. On
the other hand, to balance this, we have Rossetti's famous assertion:
"Top"--the general nickname for Morris--"never gives money to a beggar."
Mr. Mackail, if I remember right, accepted Rossetti's statement as
expressive of Morris's indifference to men as compared with causes. Mr.
Compton-Rickett, however, challenges the truth of the observation. "The
number of 'beggars,'" he affirms, "who called at his house and went away
rewarded were legion."

Mr. Belfort Bax declares that he kept a drawerful of half-crowns
for foreign anarchists, because, as he explained apologetically:
"They always wanted half-a-crown, and it saved time to have a stock
ready."

But this is no real contradiction of Rossetti. Morris's anarchists
represented his life's work to him. He did not help them from that
personal and irrational charity which made Rossetti want to give a penny
to a beggar in the street. This may be regarded as a supersubtle
distinction; but it is necessary if we are to understand the important
fact about Morris that--to quote Mr. Compton-Rickett--"human nature in the
concrete never profoundly interested him." Enthusiastic as were the
friendships of his youth--when he gushed into "dearests" in his
letters--we could imagine him as living without friends and yet being
tolerably happy. He was, as Mr. Compton-Rickett suggests, like a child
with a new toy in his discovery of ever-fresh pursuits in the three worlds
of Politics, Literature and Art. He was a person to whom even duties were
Pleasures. Mr. Mackail has spoken of him as "the rare distance of a man
who, without ever once swerving from truth or duty, knew what he liked and
did what he liked, all his life long." One thinks of him in his work as a
child with a box of paints--an inspired child with wonderful paints and
the skill to use them. He was such a child as accepts companions with
pleasure, but also accepts the absence of companions with pleasure. He
could absorb himself in his games of genius anywhere and everywhere. "Much
of his literary work was done on buses and in trains." His poetry is
often, as it were, the delightful nursery-work of a grown man. "His best
work," as Mr. Compton-Rickett says, "reads like happy improvisations."