Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/765

356 Morris, sat down at the same table with them, and opened conversation with Morris by asking, "Well, what do you think of these strikes? I can tell you: it isn't so much the workmen: it's those damned Socialist leaders. They are infernal thieves and rascals, the whole lot of them." Bland and impenetrable, Morris only answered "Indeed," in such a quiet flat voice as made it impossible to continue the subject.

One result of that growing patience was to make him more indifferent to criticism. As much from a certain "childlike shamelessness" which has been noted by one of his most intimate friends as his deepest quality, as from his no less unique self-absorption in his own thoughts and feelings, external criticism had never much affected him. No doubt there must have been a certain loss in this carelessness to the effect which his work, and he himself, made on others. Criticism has its value in letting an artist, or a human being, see, more clearly than he could do of his own self, to what he and his work really amount for his fellow-artists and fellow- creatures: and the absence of sensitiveness in an artist to the effect produced by his work may imply even for the work itself a certain loss of sensitiveness and flexibility. With Morris one often felt that it would make little or no difference to him if no one else ever saw his designs or read his books. Certainly it made no difference to him whether they met with approval from the world, or even from other artists in other methods. He might have taken for his own an ancient Celtic saying: "God has made out of his abundance a separate wisdom for everything that lives, and to do these things is my wisdom."

To criticism of his writings, whether in prose or verse, he was particularly indifferent. In his poems and his prose romances alike, he had set before him-