Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/478

ÆT. 48] worked not in the least in the world for the sake of earning leisure by it, but partly driven by the fear of starvation or disgrace, and partly, and even a very great deal, because I love the work itself." As he accounted labour without pleasure inhuman, so he claimed as the labourer's right an amount of spontaneity in his work that was far removed from the actual conditions of common labour. What he could least bear, he used to say, if he were a workman, was the uninterrupted work required of them during working hours, and he was sorry for men who had to do it. While he was working himself it was always noticeable how he would break off every now and then to get up and look out of the window, or walk up and down the room, and yet his actual output would be faster and more continuous than that of any workman who never stirred from his bench or took his hand off his machine. His horror of pleasureless labour made him keenly sympathetic with the working man even in his least lovely phases. "If I were to work ten hours a day at work I despised and hated, I should spend my leisure, I hope in political agitation, but I fear in drinking." Even of the ideal workman described above, the workman who is an artist, he confesses that "the capitalist will be apt to call him a troublesome fellow; and in fact he will be troublesome, mere grit and friction in the wheels of the money-making machine, yes, will stop the machine perhaps." And so for the workman who was troublesome without being an artist, who was grit in the wheels from no high discontent or haunting ideal, but only from the incompetence and vice he had inherited from a degraded ancestry and developed in an inhuman environment, he made the largest allowances and had almost inexhaustible patience.

Thus it was that, before and after the adoption of