THE FIRST MORRIS 299 youth. Fresh conditions were being tested by a for- mula that had suddenly grown hollow and unreal, and energetic minds sailed out into a noble emptiness, an exalted indignation or sorrow that they failed to see was at bottom only an unconscious cowardice and shirking. There were melodramatic oppositions every- where. You were scientist or saint. Ruskin and Car- lyle stalked and darkly prophesied. Reality was turned into a menace, something to be scolded and shunned. The sun of a setting religion, burning through the strange, new clouds of factory-smoke that were beginning to drift over England, turned them into a sinister pall. Now compare these hectic personal conditions with Morris's mode of life a little later. The Defence was published in 1858; The Life and Death of Jason ten years later. In the interval he had married, had built himself a house, had laid out his life like a garden, and had settled down into a snug social philosophy. This philosophy was as simple as his mind. " People, be good," was the pith of young Ruskin's first and following sermons : Morris's whole ethic was even simpler : *' People, be happy." That is the precept, framed precisely so, that reappears again and again in his familiar letters ; it was the boyish core to all his grown-up efforts and creeds. *' People, be happy — so that I can be happy too," was the centre of his socialism ; " Art is man's expression of his joy in labour," was his comfortable theory of his own task of creation. As for the nature of this felicity, the kind of thing that constituted human happiness, this had been defined for him beyond escape, beautifully coloured and balanced, by the life we have seen him living. To an extent far greater than is commonly admitted, most men unconsciously manufacture their working philosophy, and their practical ambitions and ideals, out of chance pictures and memories, haunting
