to-day just the same; and there is no reason why that former life should have been more interesting than that these people, Argenta Cavallesi and Vincenzio Grazzini, buried at my feet, should have had bigger or better made souls and bodies than I or my friends. Indeed, in sundry ways, and owing to the narrowness of life and thought, the calmer acceptance of coarse or cruel things, I incline to think that they were less interesting, those men and women of the past, whose rustling dresses fill old houses with fantastic sounds. They had, some few of them, their great art, great aims, feelings, struggles; but the majority were of the earth, and intolerably earthy. 'Tis their clothes' ghosts that haunt us, not their own. So why should the past be charming? Perhaps merely because of its being the one free place for our imagination. For, as to the future, it is either empty or filled only with the cast shadows of ourselves and our various machineries. The past is the unreal and the yet visible; it has the fascination of the distant hills, the valleys seen from above; the unreal, but the unreal whose unreality, unlike that of the unreal things with which we cram the present, can never be forced on us. There is more behind; there may be anything. This sense which makes us in love with all intricacies of things and feelings, roads which turn, views behind views, trees behind trees, makes the past so rich in possibilities. An ordinary looking priest passes by, rings at the door of the presbytery, and enters. Those who lived there, in that old stained house with the Strozzi escutcheon, opposite the five bare mulberry-trees, were doubtless as like as may be to this man who lives there in the present. Quite true; and yet there creeps up the sense that they lived in the past. For there is no end to the deceits of the past; we protest that we know it is cozening us, and it continues to cozen us just as much. Reading over Browning's Galuppi lately, it struck me that this dead world of vanity was no more charming or poetical than the one we live in, when it also was alive; and that those ladies, Mrs. X., Countess Y., and Lady Z., of whose toilettes at last night's ball that old gossip P— had been giving us details throughout dinner, will in their turn, if any one care, be just as charm ing, as dainty, and elegiac as those other women who sat by while Galuppi “played toccatas stately at the clavichord." Their dresses, should they hang for a century or so, will emit a perfume as frail, and sad, and heady; their wardrobe filled with such dust as makes tears come into one's eyes, from no mechanical reason. "Was a lady such a lady?" They will say that of ours also. And, in recognising this, we recognise how trumpery, flat, stale and unprofitable were those ladies of the past. It is not they who make the past charming, but the past that makes them. Time has wonderful cosmetics for its favoured ones; and if it brings white hairs and wrinkles to the realities, how much does it not heighten the bloom, brighten the eyes and hair of those who survive in our imagination! And thus, somewhat irrelevantly, concludes my chapters in praise of old houses. HE address we here reprint entire was derson and Mr. Emery Walker at The Doves Press, London, April 24, 1901. If along with the two other and earlier booklets printed by these gentlemen it has the appearance of being issued for the exclusive benefit of a few wealthy bibliophiles, it is redeemed by its subject matter, which appeals to a far wider clientêle. As the writer of the only complete biography of William Morris, Mr. J. W. Mackail is entitled to speak with authority. And in this more rapid survey of the man we seem to come very near to the heart of him: the real Morris to whose wonderful gifts as a great poet were added the skill of the untiring artificer, who in all things thought out or worked out by him remained a dreamer of dreams that will at last come true. Even in the six short years since the Master died there have been signs of a wider outlook upon life: mere industrialism touched to finer issues by that great movement in the Arts and Crafts, which taking root from the despised Pre-Raphaelitism of of almost infinite extension. Not only in bookmaking but in every artistic impulse, crude and amateurish though some of it must necessarily be, is this principle of joy in one's labour, of comradeship in one's work making the rough places smooth. The House Beautiful is one of many mansions : it is also built up by successive generations of faithful workers in the walls of Time. Did Morris in his day merely prove the leader of a forlorn hope? But it was a sublime hope, one that has always been in the world though at times lost sight of; a hope possible of fulfilment here and now, a hope that was never meant to die out of the heart of man. FOR OCTOBER : ROSSETTI AND THE RELIGION OF BEAUTY |