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people who do not work to live, but live to do what they consider their own peculiar piece of work? Now, if only they were craftsmen, they would make what was wanted; they would do what they were told. Some feeling of this sort may, I think, be at the back of Mr. Clutton Brock's peculiar sympathy with Morris; it would explain, too, why he did less than justice to Shelley in that remarkable study he published some years ago. He could not quite forgive the poet for being so hopelessly anti-Social. Perhaps, in his heart, Mr. Brock would hardly admit the absolute value of aesthetic rapture; he wants art to do something for life, and he loses patience with people who simply add to its confusion. Shelley, he thought, made a mess of his own life and of Harriet's, and, for all one knows, of Miss Hitchener's, and of a score of others; and his poetry you must read for its own sake or not at all. The poetry of Morris has value for people who have never known what it is to feel an aesthetic emotion, and his life was superbly useful to his fellow-men. The great State of the future will be glad of as many William Morrises as it can get. But it is I who am being less than just now. From what I have said any one might infer that I had not read, or had not appreciated, that volume called "The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems," in which are to be found things of pure beauty, "Summer Dawn," "In Prison," "The Wind," "The Haystack in the Floods"; any one might suppose that I did not know "Love is Enough." These are the poems which, with "Sigurd," give William Morris his place amongst the poets. Mr. Clutton Brock feels this surely enough, because he possesses, besides intellect, that other and rarer critical faculty, that spiritual tuning-fork by which a fine critic distinguishes between emotion and sentimentality, between rhetoric and rant. It is because Mr. Brock possesses this peculiar sensibility--part aesthetic, part ethical, and part intellectual, it seems--that he can be trusted to detect and dislike even the subtlest manifestations of that quality which most distinguishes Tennyson from Morris, Kipling from Walt Whitman, and the Bishop of London from the Vicar of Wakefield. That is why I suppose Mr. Brock to be one of our best critics. If there were anything fundamentally nasty about Morris Mr. Brock would not be inclined to overrate him. Mr. Brock pardons no unpardonable horrors: there are none here to pardon. But he overrat
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