Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/615



group of craftsmen were drawn together from many different quarters and worked in very various methods; but each in his own sphere, all alike consciously aimed at a Renaissance of the decorative arts which should act at once through and towards more humanized conditions of life both for the workman and for those for whom he worked. There were few if any among them who would not readily have acknowledged Morris as their master. The seed sown twenty-seven years before in the little workshop in Red Lion Square had long been silently and unostentatiously bearing fruit. Of those whose practice had long been moulded by Morris's influence, there were not a few for whom the ideas which underlay the whole of his work had, when they took definite shape as a body of doctrine, added a quickened impulse and a higher enthusiasm. Socialism, less as a definite creed or a dogmatic system than as a way of looking at human life and the meaning of the arts, was widely diffused among a younger generation of artists. Among these Mr. Walter Crane, by his versa-