The very things that were urged against Morris are in this sense part of
his ethical importance; part of the more promising and wholesome turn he
was half unconsciously giving to the movement of modern art. His hazier
fellow-Socialists blamed him because he made money; but this was at
least in some degree because he made other things to make money: it was
part of the real and refreshing fact that at last an aesthete had
appeared who could make something. If he was a capitalist, at least he
was what later capitalists cannot or will not be--something higher than
a capitalist, a tradesman. As compared with aristocrats like Swinburne
or aliens like Rossetti, he was vitally English and vitally Victorian.
He inherits some of that paradoxical glory which Napoleon gave
reluctantly to a nation of shopkeepers. He was the last of that nation;
he did not go out golfing: like that founder of the artistic shopman,
Samuel Richardson, "he kept his shop, and his shop kept him." The
importance of his Socialism can easily be exaggerated. Among other
lesser points, he was not a Socialist; he was a sort of Dickensian
anarchist.
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