V. L. Parrington: Through the Avenue of Art

“Consciously I was neither radical nor conservative, and yet my reading was drawing me inevitably out of the narrower field of polite literature into the new world of social thought that was rising about me. Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris became increasingly my teachers-above all others Morris. I have always been a rebel, I think, but with the bias of my training in art and letters I must enter the field of radicalism through such an avenue if at all. My economics must be sugar-coated for me. Shel...