Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/698

ÆT. 58] Ellis just before Christmas. But he was so busy now with the Press that even story-telling had to be dropped. This was one of several romances which he began in these years, and discontinued either because he was not satisfied with them or from mere lack of time. "The Wood beyond the World," his next published romance, was not completed till quite two years later.

The small printing-press had been occupied during the earlier part of the winter of 1891–2 in turning out the third of the Kelmscott Press books, the volume of poems by Mr. Wilfrid Blunt. As soon as that volume was finished, it was set to work upon a reprint of Ruskin's celebrated chapter "On the Nature of Gothic" from "The Stones of Venice." It was the first thing that, when Morris met with it long ago at Oxford, had set fire to his enthusiasm, and kindled the beliefs of his whole life. In the preface to this reprint, dated 15th February, 1892, he states briefly and clearly the effect which Ruskin's teaching had had on himself, and the permanent value which he still conceived it to possess. "To my mind," he says, this chapter "is one of the most important things written by the author, and in future days will be considered as one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century. To some of us when we first read it"—in those dawn-golden days at Oxford—"now many years ago, it seemed to point out a new road on which the world should travel. The lesson which Ruskin here teaches us is that art is the expression of man's pleasure in labour; that it is possible for man to rejoice in his work, for, strange as it may seem to us to-day, there have been times when he did rejoice in it."

Even more: in this chapter, and in the subsequent teaching which did little more than expand and