Show WILLIAM MORRIS A Sketch of the Distinguished Poet and Socialist > NQ Courtier and Always Dressss In Blue terse A Peep at Ills House In a f fcociahsiic Ucsting Special Correspondence ot THE HERALD LONDON Nov IS Whoever else may bo in the running for the laureateship William I Wil-liam Morns poet and socialist is not Yet as a poet there is not of his generation a man to rank before him William Morris would make a bad courtier In the first place what of a court suit Ho never clothes his burly limbs in anything but blue serge in whicn he looks for all the world like a bluff sea captain The tan of the sea breezes is on his cheeks their clearness clear-ness In his eyes If ho bo asked to dinner the first thing he stipulates isJor his serge carments and no swallowtail I remember remem-ber that when ho was in Dublin a few years ago his hostess sent word to all invited in-vited to meet him at dinner to wear morning morn-Ing dress From his poetry no one would expect ex-pect him to became in time a socialist a shopkeeper and a friend of tho workingman working-man ° The Earthly Paradise is steeped if ever poem was in a golden sensuousness sensuous-ness The Defense of Guinivere and Love is Enough are misty with that glamour of the past which once it has laid its spell upon a man is apt to bury him in a palace of dreams that might be the sleeping sleep-Ing beautys Yet while becoming a man of vehement actions such ns his physique pointed to his becoming ho has surrounded his life with such beauty as is not often workaday ipsar AZt i W 1tDT 1 1 r 0 WILLIAM MOHIUB When Morris Is airborne it is in a big rod oldfashioned house on the Mall Hammersmith Hammer-smith It looks over the wide waters of the Thames and in the distance one sees little Chis wick Eyot green in the mists When I was there it was the early autumn and we drank our tea in tbe garden Miss May Morris who is now Mrs Halliday Sparling and the wife of a very delightful young socialist and litterateur presided aS the tea table It is an old abundant garden gar-den that was once a country garden and looks a little forlorn amid the encroaching brick and mortar It used to have orchards or-chards on every side but now tho apples of the Hesperides glimmer only in its own old trees The fruit trees are in the vegetable vege-table beds in delightful homely fashion Roses are on the trellis and the place rings with birds for the refugees whom London has thurst out find a home in these gnarlea boughs I remember that a mulberry mul-berry tree was in fruit that evening and 1 tasted the berries for the second time the first had been tram Miltons mulberry tree in tbe masters garden of Christs college Cambridge If you would see Willam Morris you have only to go any Sunday evening to the Socialist meetings which are held in the hall he has annexed to his house for the purposes of Socialism It is a bare place enough of lath and plaster The evening I was there the debate was opened by Mr Belford Bax a wilder reformer than Morris Mor-ris himself approves of At least he constantly con-stantly interjected little phrases of moderation moder-ation from the table at which he sat busily writing Bernard Shaw was another of the speakers Mr Walter Crane sat quietly in a front row and did not open his lips Man after man in the audience got up in turn to air his views The question was taxation I think Some were lucid minded and knew what thoy wanted others again worked themselves into a blind fury against the rich which was pathetic and hopeless Then there were the cranks the anti vaccination crank who aired his grievance every Sunday regularly reg-ularly and whose openintr sentence was greeted with a guffaw the anticlerical crank who thought the millenium would be here if churches were done away with Mr W B Yeats tho young Irish post who promises more for greatness than any young man we have writing verse Morris is brusque and kind most goner ous and lar hearted Ho is full of the most restless energy and choleric one would say from hIs fine face Like many of tho Socialist leaders Hyndmnn and Champion and CunningbamGrahame among them he comes of gentlefolk was a public schoolboy and an Oxford university univer-sity man It was his restless energy i suppose that drove him out of golden poetical dreams into a full busy and bene llcent life I should not be a bit surprised to hear of him some such story as I have heard of another social reformer whose father was one of Englands greatest soldiers and Irelands noblest sons This gentleman like William Morris has established a cooperative industry near London which is a practical Socialism He is a big sinewy bronzed person Imagine the surprise of a friend of mine staying in the house at seeing him the first evening draw out a workbasket and proceed with the making of a nightshirt in which ho took prodigious stitches while sucking away placidly at a big pipe I hOh said his wife when my friend laughed Henry is ao energetic that hIs hands must be employed em-ployed even when one would think he might rest so he makes all tho nightshirts night-shirts of the neighborhood KATUAJUNE TyxAx I |