Chapter 11 - Page 2

detachable phrases and I can remember little of his
speech, which many thought the best of all good talk, except that
it matched his burly body and seemed within definite boundaries
inexhaustible in fact and expression. He alone of all the men I
have known seemed guided by some beast-like instinct and never ate
strange meat. 'Balzac! Balzac!' he said to me once, 'Oh, that was
the man the French bourgeoisie read so much a few years ago.' I
can remember him at supper praising wine: 'Why do people say it is
prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by the
sunlight and the sap?' and his dispraising houses decorated by
himself: 'Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a
house like a big barn, where one ate in one corner, cooked in
another corner, slept in the third corner & in the fourth received
one's friends'; and his complaining of Ruskin's objection to the
underground railway: 'If you must have a railway the best thing
you can do with it is to put it in a tube with a cork at each
end.' I remember too that when I asked what led up to his
movement, he replied, 'Oh, Ruskin and Carlyle, but somebody should
have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes.'
Though I remember little, I do not doubt that, had I continued
going there on Sunday evenings, I should have caught fire from his
words and turned my hand to some mediaeval work or other. Just
before I had ceased to go there I had sent my 'Wanderings of
Usheen' to his daughter, hoping of course that it might meet his
eyes, & soon after sending it I came upon him by chance in
Holborn. 'You write my sort of poetry,' he said and began to
praise me and to promise to send his praise to 'The Commonwealth,'
the League organ, and he would have said more of a certainty had
he not caught sight of a new ornamental cast-iron lamp-post and
got very heated upon that subject.

I did not read economics, having turned socialist because of
Morris's lectures and pamphlets, and I think it unlikely that Morris
himself could read economics. That old dogma of mine seemed germane
to the matter. If the men and women imagined by the poets were the
norm, and if Morris had, in, let us say, 'News from Nowhere,' then
running through 'The Commonwealth,' described such men and women
living under their natural conditions or as they would desire to
live, then those conditions themselves must be the norm, and could
we but get rid of certain institutions the world would turn from
eccentricity. Perhaps Morris himself justified himself in his own
heart by as simple an argument, and was, as the socialist D... said
to me one night walking home after some lecture, 'an anarchist
without knowing it.' Certainly I and all about me, including