Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/772

ÆT. 63] moment, alive: this or that interest might pass, one or another occupation be taken up or discarded, but the interest of living, the occupation of creating and working, would never lessen or falter.

To the same central quality, the seriousness and simplicity which walked, without noticing them, through all the hedges and over all the ditches of worldly convention, it was due that he was so conspicuously at his ease in the society of a class different from his own. Civility to inferiors was certainly not one of his strong points; and the aristocratic temper of his youth would show itself even in his latest years. But it was a temper rather than a principle; in a very real sense he treated his servants or workmen as he treated his social equals; and though he often, in the terse phrase of common usage, wiped his boots on a man, he never either showed or felt towards him the more stinging insolence of condescension. To working men he was like one of themselves, one who worked as they did and lived a quite intelligible life, but who was full of queer, and for the most part fantastic or unintelligible, ideas. Yet many letters received after his death show that working men held him in real honour, and felt a personal grief for the loss of one who had been on their side, who had meant well by them, who had brought to some degree a new meaning into their own life. Such tributes are apt to be paid in an artificial currency; but in these letters a sincere emotion struggles to express itself through the worn and ill-fitting phrases, the stock of cheap ready-made clothing for ideas which the industry and keen intelligence of commercial journalism, copying with a fatal instinct all that is worst in its models, produces wholesale for an ever widening market. In an ill-spelled and touching letter, the Walthamstow Branch of the