He
had a child's sudden and impulsive temper, too. Once, having come into his
studio in a rage, he "took a flying kick at the door, and smashed in a
panel." "It's all right," he assured the scared model, who was preparing
to fly; "it's all right--_something_ had to give way." The same violence
of impulse is seen in the story of how, on one occasion, when he was
staying in the country, he took an artistic dislike to his hostess's
curtains, and tore them down during the night. His judgments were often
much the same kind of untempered emotions as he showed in the matter of
the curtains--his complaint, for example, that a Greek temple was "like a
table on four legs: a damned dull thing!" He was a creature of whims: so
much so that, as a boy, he used to have the curse, "Unstable as water,
thou shalt not excel," flung at him. He enjoyed the expression of
knock-out opinions such as: "I always bless God for making anything so
strong as an onion!" He laughed easily, not from humour so much as from a
romping playfulness. He took a young boy's pleasure in showing off the
strength of his mane of dark brown hair. He would get a child to get hold
of it, and lift him off the ground by it "with no apparent inconvenience."
He was at the same time nervous and restless. He was given to talking to
himself; his hands were never at peace; "if he read aloud, he punched his
own head in the exuberance of his emotions." Possibly there was something
high-strung even about his play, as when, Mr. Mackail tells us, "he would
imitate an eagle with considerable skill and humour, climbing on to a
chair and, after a sullen pause, coming down with a soft, heavy flop." It
seems odd that Mr. John Burns could say of this sensitive and capricious
man of genius, as we find him saying in Mr. Compton-Rickett's book, that
"William Morris was a chunk of humanity in the rough; he was a piece of
good, strong, unvarnished oak--nothing of the elm about him." But we can
forgive Mr. Burns's imperfect judgment in gratitude for the sentences that
follow:

There is no side of modern life which he has not touched for good.
I am sure he would have endorsed heartily the House and Town
Planning Act for which I am responsible.

Morris, by the way, would have appreciated Mr. Burns's reference to him as
a fellow-craftsman: did he not once himself boast of being "a master
artisan, if I may claim that dignity"?

The buoyant life of this craftsman-preacher--whose craf