WILLIAM MORRIS


LTHOUGH the name of William Morris
  has long since become a household word
  throughout America, yet the personality of
  the man, as well as his great part in the
  world's work, is definitely known but to
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phase of which appeals to a more or less extended public.
                        To students of literature he is
an innovator in his art; one who introduced a new
element into the Victorian age; a poet who, beginning
his career as an Anglo-Norman mediaevalist, next drew
inspiration from the Greek and Latin classics, and finally
from widened reading, knowledge and travel, absorbed,
at first hand, influences from the Scandinavns who
peopled Iceland. In literature, William Morris is the
enthusiastic student of Chaucer; he is the creator of
" The Earthly Paradise;" the modern skald who, learned
in   guage, legend and history, told to English-speaking
folk the Great Story of the North, which, in his own
opinion,1"should be for all our race what the tale of Troy
was to the Greeks."
                        For others, William Morris
represents a most important factor in the progress of
modern art. He was a member of that group of brilliant,
earnest young Englishmen who, at the. middle of the
Nineteenth Century., revolutionized the national school of
painting, and generated a current of aestheticism whose
vibrations are still felt, not only in the parent country, but
as well in America and in France. from his relations
with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and from his own
practical enius, Morris evolved a system of household
art, which has largely *wept away the ugly and the
commonplace from the English middle-class home. He
so became an expert in what he himself was pleased to
call "the lesser arts of life." He was a handicraftsman,


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