Morris was provincial as the Pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson and Carlyle were provincial, as Swinburne and Whistler were not; his mind could rarely escape from the place and age in which it was formed. He looked at art and life, and at the future even, from the point of view of an Englishman and a Victorian; and when he tries to change his position we feel the Victorian labouring, more or less unsuccessfully, to get out of himself. When I accuse him of being "amateurish" I do not use that vile word in contradistinction to "professional." In a sense all true artists must be amateurs; the professional view, the view that art is a hopeful and genteel way of earning one's living, is possible only to official portrait-painters and contractors for public monuments. When I say that Morris, like almost all our visual artists and too many of our modern writers, was amateurish, I mean that he was not serious enough about his art. He tended to regard art as a part of life instead of regarding life as a means to art. A long morning's work, an afternoon of fresh air, a quiet evening, and so to bed and fit next morning for another good spell of production; something of that sort, one fancies, was not unlike the ideal of William Morris. It is a craftsman's ideal; it is a good life for any one but an artist; and it would be a good attitude towards art if art were not something altogether different from work. Alas! it is the English attitude. I never look at those Saxon manuscripts in the British Museum but I say to myself: "And didn't they go out and have a game of cricket after hours and work all the harder next day for their wholesome exercise!" But from the fatal curse Morris was free; no man of great ability was ever less conceited. You will not find in his work a trace of that tired pomposity which tells us that the great man is showing off, or of that empty pretentious singularity which betrays the vanity of the lonely British artist. Morris was never the self-conscious master calling on sun and moon to stand and watch him sign his name, neither was he the shy genius of the English hedgerows sheltering his little talent from contemporary infection and the chill winds of criticism.