Page:William-morris-and-the-early-days-of-the-socialist-movement.djvu/121

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WILLIAM MORRIS

round the Square, he remarked, 'You have statues to Scott, Burns, and Campbell, but none to Dunbar or David Lindsay. Nor is there, Craibe Angus tells me, any memorial in Glasgow to William Motherwell, though he was a Glasgow man, and one of your best poets, besides being among the first Britishers to perceive the greatness of old Scandinavian literature. You have the illustrious heroes Victoria and Albert, but not Wallace or Bruce. Curious, isn't it?'

As we were crossing the river he stood for a moment looking at the huge unsightly girder-bridge of the railway spanning the river and completely blocking from view the western course of the water-way. I thought he was about to explode against the monstrous eyesore, but he turned away from it with a weary gesture. 'I wonder,' he said, speaking rather to himself than to me, 'if the time will ever come—and God! surely it must come—when to do a thing like that will be reckoned as devilish as poisoning wells or burning down churches and museums of Art. We speak of ourselves as a civilised people and yet are capable of ghoulish vandalism like that.'

Our house in Crown Street was one of the tenement flats universal in Glasgow, except in the West End and suburban neighbourhoods. Morris had already some notion of the Glasgow tenement system, but was curious about some of the arrangements of the dwellings that were unfamiliar to his English eyes. Ours, though one of the more spacious and improved dwellings of its class, was, like all other tenement houses in Glasgow, provided with nothing in the shape of a garden except the customary 'back-court' or 'green' used for drying clothes, and common to all the tenants. Speaking of the absence of garden plots anywhere in Glasgow, he said he did not know whether to be more surprised that the Glasgow people were not all revolutionists, or that any of them had enough imagination left in them to be Socialists at all.

'I wonder,' he mused, 'what sort of chap I should have been, Glasier, had I been brought up a fellow townsman of