tsmanship, indeed,
was the chief part of his preaching--who taught the labourers of his age,
both by precept and example, that the difference between success and
failure in life was the difference between being artisans of loveliness
and poor hackworkers of profitable but hideous things--has a unique
attractiveness in the history of the latter half of the nineteenth
century. He is a figure of whom we cannot be too constantly and vividly
reminded. When I took up Mr. Compton-Rickett's book I was full of hope
that it would reinterpret for a new generation Morris's evangelistic
personality and ideals. Unfortunately, it contains very little of
importance that has not already appeared in Mr. Mackail's distinguished
biography; and the only interpretation of first-rate interest in the book
occurs in the bold imaginative prose of Mr. Cunninghame Graham's
introduction. More than once the author tells us the same things as Mr.
Mackail, only in a less life-like way. For example, where Mr. Mackail says
of Morris that "by the time he was seven years old he had read all the
Waverley novels, and many of Marryat's," Mr. Compton-Rickett vaguely
writes: "He was suckled on Romance, and knew his Scott and Marryat almost
before he could lisp their names." That is typical of Mr.
Compton-Rickett's method. Instead of contenting himself with simple and
realistic sentences like Mr. Mackail's, he aims at--and certainly
achieves--a kind of imitative picturesqueness. We again see his taste for
the high-flown in such a paragraph as that which tells us that "a common
bond unites all these men--Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris. They
differed in much; but, like great mountains lying apart in the base, they
converge high up in the air." The landscape suggested in these sentences
is more topsy-turvy than the imagination likes to dwell upon. And the
criticisms in the book are seldom lightning-flashes of revelation. For
instance:

A more polished artistry we find in Tennyson; a greater
intellectual grip in Browning; a more haunting magic in Rossetti;
but for easy mastery over his material and general diffusion of
beauty Morris has no superior.

That, apart from the excellent "general diffusion of beauty," is the kind
of conventional criticism that might pass in a paper read to a literary
society. But somehow, in a critic who deliberately writes a book, we look
for a greater and more personal mastery of his authors than Mr.
Compton-Ricke