That among all her children Man is really Nature’s prime favourite seems pretty evident, though no one can say why. It is to him that the Great Mother is ever pointing and saying, “A poor creature, but mine own. I shall do something with him some day, but I must not try to force him.” Here, indeed, is the mistake of the Socialists. They think they can force the very creature who above all others cannot be forced. They think they can turn him into something rich and strange—turn him in a single generation—even as certain ingenious experimentalists turned what Nature meant for a land-salamander into a water-salamander, with new rudder-tail and gills instead of lungs and feet suppressed, by feeding him with water animals in oxygenated water and cajoling his functions. Competition, that evolved Shakespeare from an ascidian, may be a mistake of Nature’s—M. Arsène Houssaye declares that she never was so wise and artistically perfect as we take her to be—but her mistakes are too old to be rectified in a single generation. A little more knowledge, we say, and a little less zeal would save the Socialist from being considered by the advanced thinker—who, studying the present by the light of the past, sees that all civilization is provisional—as the most serious obstructive whom he has to encounter. As to Morris, we have always felt that, take him all round, he is the richest and most varied in artistic endowments of any man of our time. On whichsoever of the fine arts he had chanced to concentrate his gifts and energies the result would have been the same as in poetry. In the front rank he would always have been. But it is not until we come to deal with his socialism that we see how entirely aestheticism is the primal source from which all his energies spring. That he has a great and generous heart—a heart that must needs sympathize with every form of distress—no one can doubt who reads these two books, {263} and yet his socialism comes from an entirely æsthetic impulse. It is the vulgarities of civilization, it is the ugliness of contemporary life—so unlike that Earthly Paradise of the poetic dream—that have driven him from his natural and proper work. He cannot take offence at our saying this, for he has said it himself in ‘Signs of Change’:—