Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/440

ÆT. 48] Only should it not have been called, The history of a great author's liver? Not to mention symptoms too much, I in a small way understand something of that: to look upon your own natural work, which you have chosen out of all the work of the world, with a sick disgust, when you are not at it: to be sore and raw with your friends, distrustful of them, antagonistic to them, when you are not in their company: to want society and to hate it when you've got it:—all these things are just as much a part of the disease as physical squeamishness: but you see, poor chap, he was so always bad that he scarcely had a chance of finding that out. But mind you, I don't believe he didn't enjoy writing his books more or less, even 'Frederick,' the dullest of them and the one he groans over most. After all, my moral from it all is the excellence of art, its truth, and its power of expression. Set 'Sartor Resartus' by all this, and what a difference!

"The story of the old father is touching in spite of its clannishness (which perhaps is not so bad a thing; holds the world together somewhat). He really must have been a good fellow not to have bullied his queer son. Only they wouldn't have been the worse for a touch of definite art up there; even among those beautiful mountains and moors."

But "the cause," a term perhaps specifically used by Morris for the first time in the letter quoted above, was now shaping itself in his mind to something on which the whole of his life both as an artist and as a human being converged: and it was in London, where he saw the misery of the present most acute, that he also discerned, or thought he discerned, some lifting on the horizon, and some glimmer of future hope. To retreat from the pressure of social problems into "a little Palace of Art of one's own" (in the phrase