Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/616

ÆT. 54] tility and energy, as well as the acknowledged excellence of his artistic work, held a leading place. Mr. T.J. Cobden-Sanderson brought to the movement an energy as great, united with the gift of a copious and persuasive eloquence. Among the younger men Mr. Heywood Sumner, Mr. W.R. Lethaby, and Mr. W.A.S. Benson may be singled out as prominent members of the group. Only a few out of the whole body were, either then or subsequently, professed Socialists. Some of them were Conservative or even ultra-Conservative in politics. But they all in their special lines of work carried out ideas of which Morris was the original source. To them, and to many others, he has been, both while he lived and afterwards, an inspiring and guiding influence of the first importance.

Alongside of this movement, or rather essentially included in it, was another movement towards a reintegration of labour, a practical socialism of handicraft as applied to the arts. This movement expressed itself in two ways. On the one hand it aimed at a new organization of work within the single workshop, so that the manager, the designer, and the artificer should cease to be three distinct persons belonging to different social grades, differently educated and differently employed, working without mutual sympathy, or even each in active hostility to the others. On the other hand it expressed itself in the co-ordination of these workshops, hitherto isolated units of productive energy, whether by means of formal guilds and associations, or through more intangible links of common ideas and kindred enthusiasms, into the beginnings of a trained organism of handicraftsmen, with a mutual intercommunication, and a cumulative force of trained intelligence. What Morris himself