For there was
going on in the churchyard the only thing I saw that day that
seemed to me to strike a false note; a silly posing of village
girls, self-conscious and overdressed, before the camera of a
photographer--a playing at aesthetics, bringing into the village
life a touch of unwholesome vanity and the vulgar affectation of
the world. That is the ugly shadow of fame; it makes conventional
people curious about the details of a great man's life and
surroundings, without initiating them into any sympathy with his
ideals and motives. The price that the real worshippers pay for
their inspiration is the slavering idolatry of the unintelligent;
and I withdrew in a mournful wonder from the place, wishing I could
set an invisible fence round the scene, a fence which none should
pass but the few who had the secret and the key in their hearts.
And here, for the pleasure of copying the sweet words, let me
transcribe a few sentences from Morris's own description of the
house itself:
"A house that I love with a reasonable love, I think; for though my
words may give you no idea of any special charm about it, yet I
assure you that the charm is there; so much has the old house grown
up out of the soil and the lives of those that lived on it: some
thin thread of tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of
meadow and acre and wood and river; a certain amount (not too much,
let us hope) of common-sense, a liking for making materials serve
one's turn, and perhaps at bottom some little grain of sentiment--
this, I think, was what went to the making of the old house.
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