Page:William-morris-and-the-early-days-of-the-socialist-movement.djvu/111

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88
WILLIAM MORRIS

courses of polite religious and literary societies. And not the least gain was the part the affair played in bringing about the rapprochement between the Socialist and the younger art movements. It was from the Edinburgh Art Congress incident that we must date the beginning of that remarkable bent towards Socialism among the students of the Glasgow and other art schools which soon afterwards became one of the most significant facts in the culture of the period. Within half a dozen years fully more than a half of the art students in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and later in Manchester, Birmingham, and other centres, were either avowed Socialists or were largely influenced by Socialist ideas.

I must briefly relate the interesting experience we had in Glasgow with our Art Congress comrades during their visit.

On the Sunday following the Congress, the four 'culprits,' as Morris called them, were, as it happened, booked to address a meeting in Glasgow under the auspices of the Glasgow branch of the Socialist League. Crane was to give his lecture on 'The Educational Value of Art,' with blackboard illustrations, Morris was to preside, and Cobden-Sanderson and Walker were to give short addresses. This was a big catch for us, and it grieved us sorely that we could not obtain the City Hall for the meeting, and had to be content instead with the Waterloo Hall, which held at most only some 800. As it turned out, however, this hall proved large enough for the meeting—the rainy evening and the charge for admission, 1s. and 6d., yielding us an audience that just comfortably filled the hall.

Our visitors arrived from Edinburgh on the Saturday evening, and about a dozen of us improvised a little gathering with them in the hotel. They were all in good spirits over the success of the Edinburgh gatherings, and Morris hit off amusingly the crudities of some of the 'old Duffers,' as he called them, who had been pompously speaking of art