A Victorian Rebel

THIS book, the Life of William Morris, had its inception in a Ph.D. thesis, and some faults of the type have persisted through an evidently considerable amount of revision and expansion. The text is thorough to weariness on points that contribute little to real appreciation, and at the same time it is tactless in the arousal of curiosity that is not and perhaps cannot be gratified. What eventually brings the subject to life is not primarily either animation in the writing, which is often pedestrian, or the incorporation of fresh material, of which Mr. Eshleman has accumulated no little from a daughter of Morris and from sons and daughters of his intimates. Rather, Morris lives in a saturation of these chapters with his own words and thoughts. Whole sections of the book are little but mosaics of his utterances, cemented into running paraphrase and illuminated with characterizations judiciously quoted from Clutton-Brock and others. The result, it not particularly distinguished as literary art, is well worth our having at this time when everything that happens in organized society throws a vivid light backward upon Morris’s socialism and brings out the respects in which he was a prophet and a seer.