REVIEWS 269
or circumstance, finally depend upon the physical and social conditions of life which exist for the mass of their fellow-creatures. It was not till long afterward that this view of the matter took full hold of Morris, the country- bred boy, the easy liver, and born aristocrat. But its influence was already sufficient to insure him against the belief that salvation lay in dreams of the ^ past or in isolation from the common life of the world.
The next year, while making a tour of the cathedral towns of France with Burne-Jones, Morris shows in his letters his tendency toward future ways of thought, regarding both life and architecture. After describing in a style worthy of his future prose romances the lovely French country, he exclaims: "But we had to leave it, and go to Rouen by a nasty, brimstone, noisy, shrieking railway train that cares not two-pence for hill or valley, poplar tree or corn poppy, purple thistle or white convolvulus ; . . . . that cares not two-pence either for tower or spire, or apse, or dome, for it will be as noisy and obtru- sive under the spires of Chartres or the towers of Rouen as it is under Versailles or the dome of the Invalides ; verily, railways are abomina- tions.'" It was on this journey that "walking together on the quays of Havre, late into the August night, Morris and Burne-Jones at last took the definite decision to be artists. Morris did not graduate as a pro- fessional architect, nor in all his life did he ever build a house. But for him, then and always, the word 'architecture' bore an immense, and one might almost say a transcendental, meaning."
Just after this, in a long letter to his mother, acquainting her with his decision, he says : " In any work one delights in, even the merest drudgery connected with it is delightful too." Years later, in 1S81, his horror of pleasureless labor provoked these words: " If I were to work ten hours a day at work I despised and hated, I should spend my leisure I hope in political agitation, but I fear in drinking."
2. One cause to which, it is well known, he gave much time and skilled attention was the Society for the Protection of Ancient Build- ings, or, as Morris himself styled it, the "Anti-Scrape Society." Writing of the year 1877 Mackail says :
Almost without knowing it Morris was now beginning to take part in
public action and political life His innate socialism — if the word
may for once be used in its natural sense, and not as expressing any doctrine — was and had been from his earliest beginnings the quality which more than any other permeated and dominated all he did. In this year it forced itself into two different channels, which would by ordinary people be distinguished from one another as belonging to the fields of art and politics, but which to Morris
