Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/539

130 sive, so that while there may be hope for a man of genius for pushing forward the standard of excellence, no one, be he of genius or not, need waste half the energies of his life in half-fruitless individual experiments, the results of which he cannot pass on to others? What signs are there of collective skill, the skill of the school, which nurses moderate talent and sets genius free? Scanty signs indeed: at best a plausible appearance of workmanlike execution, a low kind of skill which manages to get through the job, but in so dull and joyless a way that one's eye almost refuses to rest upon the canvas, or one's brain to take in any idea it may strive to express. That is all, I fear, that can claim to represent anything like traditional workmanlike skill. What other skill of execution is visible is chiefly, almost entirely, an amateur-like cleverness, experimental, uncertain, never successful in accomplishing a real work, in expressing a fact or an imagination simply and straightforwardly, but often enough succeeding in thrusting itself forward and attracting attention to itself as something dashing, clever, and—useless; the end, not the means. Of this kind of skill there is a good deal; and to speak plainly it is on this quality, such as it is, that most of the pictures must rest their claim to attention."

Lecturing, in and out of London, had now become his most serious occupation. At Manchester he mournfully notes that "the workmen seem on the whole to identify themselves with the middle classes." Elsewhere "there was a funny old ex-Chartist present, an old man of seventy; he said it made him feel twenty years younger." At Edinburgh "a very good audience, and we fished two additional members, not much you will say, but things go slowly." Bradford, Leeds, Blackburn, Leicester, Glasgow, were among