es, or rather
overmarks, William Morris as a scrupulous but soft-hearted examiner
might overmark a sympathetic pupil. He never gives marks when the answer
is wrong, but he gives a great many when it is right: and he is a little
blind to deficiencies. He does not make it clear that Morris, as an
artist, was cursed with two of the three modern English vices, that he
was provincial and amateurish. But he gives him full credit for not
being goaded to futility by a sense of his own genius.

Morris was provincial as the Pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson and Carlyle
were provincial, as Swinburne and Whistler were not; his mind could
rarely escape from the place and age in which it was formed. He looked
at art and life, and at the future even, from the point of view of an
Englishman and a Victorian; and when he tries to change his position we
feel the Victorian labouring, more or less unsuccessfully, to get out of
himself. When I accuse him of being "amateurish" I do not use that vile
word in contradistinction to "professional." In a sense all true artists
must be amateurs; the professional view, the view that art is a hopeful
and genteel way of earning one's living, is possible only to official
portrait-painters and contractors for public monuments. When I say that
Morris, like almost all our visual artists and too many of our modern
writers, was amateurish, I mean that he was not serious enough about his
art. He tended to regard art as a part of life instead of regarding life
as a means to art. A long morning's work, an afternoon of fresh air, a
quiet evening, and so to bed and fit next morning for another good
spell of production; something of that sort, one fancies, was not unlike
the ideal of William Morris. It is a craftsman's ideal; it is a good
life for any one but an artist; and it would be a good attitude towards
art if art were not something altogether different from work. Alas! it
is the English attitude. I never look at those Saxon manuscripts in the
British Museum but I say to myself: "And didn't they go out and have a
game of cricket after hours and work all the harder next day for their
wholesome exercise!"

But from the fatal curse Morris was free; no man of great ability was
ever less conceited. You will not find in his work a trace of that tired
pomposity which tells us that the great man is showing off, or of that
empty pretentious singularity which betrays the vanity of the lonely
British artist. Morris was nev