WILLIAM MORRIS (continued 3)

'lay there a-longing for the green fields and the white-thorn bushes and the lark singing over the corn, and the talk of good fellows round the ale-house bench, and the babble of the little children, and the team on the road and the beasts afield, and all the life of earth.'

The book need not be considered in detail in connection with Morris's socialism, for it is but a suggestion, whilst News from Nowhere is an elaborate statement. But it contains certain words that were very close to Morris's heart. The recognition, for example, that humanity cannot reach the simplicity that he conceived to be its finest end without much thought and careful fostering, or in other words that this simplicity was not the product of barbarism but of a highly perfected state of evolution, finds expression in the frank acceptance by this clear-headed and high-hearted priest of the value of his companion's scholarship. In this book, as always, Morris kept his work definitely in the region of imaginative art. Not only is the descriptive writing vivid and full of beauty, but he retains throughout the full power of literary illusion. This is very strikingly shown in the pages where the priest questions the dreamer as to what will be the end of that distant day of oppression of which they are speaking. Will a new and clear day break on us? As we read through to the answer we become deeply concerned as to what it will be, as though we were listening indeed to one speaking with authority; and when we find that it is one of hopefulness and courage we feel strangely and splendidly reassured. We know again that the finest persuasiveness is that of art.

News from Nowhere appeared in America in 1890 and in England in 1891. It has been, perhaps, the most popular of all Morris's writings, but curiously under-estimated by his critics both as a practical enunciation of his social creed and as an embodiment of his social vision. The scheme of the book is very simple. The narrator—Morris again, of course—goes to bed one winter night at his Hammersmith house. He wakes to a fresh June morning in an altered world. The life of this world, the new communism somewhere in the twenty-second century, he describes at length, and weaves into it a long conversation with one of its old men which traces the course by which it has grown from the nineteenth century and defines the errors which it has cancelled. The constitution of this life may be assailable at certain points, and some of the steps by which it has been reached—the armed revolution for instance—may be arbitrary in conception, but these things are of no moment. The important fact is that Morris's indictment of our contemporary social system is perfectly logical at every point, and that the new life that he creates is complete in its humanity and not that of a misty world of dreams. Of its prophetic value it is impossible to speak; as to that we can decide in our imagination alone. But to suggest that the book is not consistently conscious of the true nature of our social defects on its negative side, and on its positive side fiercely alive to the real meaning of life, is merely to misunderstand it and its subject. Some examination on both these sides is necessary in support of this statement, and its negative or destructive teaching is to be considered first.

Men should have joy in the work of their hands, and they had none. That, in Morris's view, was the fundamental evil to be cured, and he seeks at the outset to discover its cause. Says Hammond, who acts as spokesman for the new people—

'Go and have a look at the sheep-walks high up the slopes between Ingleborough and Pen-y-gwent and tell me if you think we waste the land there by not covering it with factories for making things that nobody wants, which was the chief business of the nineteenth century!'

This state was the product, he continues, of 'a most elaborate system of buying and selling, which has been called the World-Market; and that World-Market, once set a-going, forced them to go on making more and more of these wares, whether they needed them or not.' The result was, of course, that the system became master of the work, and the work itself ceased to have any significance, and 'under this horrible burden of unnecessary production it became impossible for them to look upon labour and its results from any other point of view than one—to wit, the ceaseless endeavour to expend the least possible amount of labour on any made, and yet at the same time to make as many articles as possible.' Anybody who has had the smallest experience of commerce knows that this is precisely the vicious circle into which we have been caught. And with this Morris sets out clearly the fact that the support of this state is to the interest solely of the men who have the power to control labour and not that of the labour itself, but that the workers have on the one hand, as he says in the passage quoted from A Dream of John Ball, a hope that they too may become masters and tyrannize in turn, and, on the other hand, the long habit of drawing wages from these controllers has imbued them with a dull belief that they are in reality dependent not on their own work but upon some indefinable source of wealth set up above them. Then, again, this system of class privilege has behind it the power of a government that, though mainly ineffective in itself, yet controls a further system of right by might—the Law Courts and police and military, all of which things, with a fine show of judicial balance, can be and are employed not to develop society but to uphold establishments, the chief of which is this very privilege and inequality. So that by an elaborate structure of oppression which is necessary to the maintenance of the position of the few, the people are quite effectually prevented from bringing any spiritual discipline into their work, and are so deprived of the most abiding happiness that life has to offer. That briefly is the central significance of Morris's social proposition. The practical means of deliverance is a matter upon which no two people are likely to agree, and the method suggested by Morris need not be discussed, because it does not really affect the general question. But it cannot well be denied that his view of the evil is a sound one, and that deliverance in one way or another is a possibility by which alone contemplation of the evil is made tolerable.

The constructive aspect of the book not only shows the life for which Morris hoped, but answers many of the objections made by reaction to socialism in any shape. 'I have been told,' says the stranger, 'that political strife was a necessary result of human nature.'

'Human nature!' cried the old boy impetuously; 'what human nature?' The human nature of paupers, of slaves, of slave-holders, or the human nature of wealthy freemen? Which? Come, tell me that!

And then again—

'Now, this is what I want to ask you about, to wit, how you get people to work when there is no reward of labour, and especially how you get them to work strenuously?'

'No reward of labour?' said Hammond, gravely, 'the reward of labour is life. Is that not enough?'

'But no reward for especially good work,' quoth I.

'Plenty of reward,' said he, 'the reward of creation. The wages which God gets, as people might have said time agone. If you are going to ask to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is what excellence in work means, the next thing we shall hear of will be a bill sent in for the begetting of children.'

'Well, but,' said I, 'the man of the nineteenth century would say there is a natural desire toward the procreation of children, and a natural desire not to work.'

'Yes, yes,' said he, 'I know the ancient platitude; wholly untrue; indeed, to us quite meaningless.'

That is very simple, and yet it shows the profoundest insight into the essential nature of humanity. Nothing is sadder or more ludicrous than to hear people say that they turn to the degraded sensationalism that passes for life in daily report because of their interest in human nature. The enervating influence of this perversion of life upon much of our finest artistic genius has been mentioned. Morris was not much given to criticizing contemporary literature in his writing, but he makes one of the people in his new world say of certain books of the late nineteenth century—

'But I say flatly that in spite of all their cleverness and vigour, and capacity for story telling, there is something loathsome about them. Some of them, indeed, do here and there show some feeling for those whom the history-books call 'poor,' and of the misery of whose lives we have some inkling; but presently they give it up, and towards the end of the story we must be contented to see the hero and heroine living in an island of bliss on other people's troubles; and that after a long series of sham troubles (or mostly sham) of their own making, illustrated by dreary introspective nonsense about their feelings and aspirations, and all the rest of it.'

That was written before the new day of John Galsworthy and John Masefield, and even then Morris would have been the first to make many honourable exclusions from his charge. But the charge itself was founded on deep understanding.

In the life to which the revolt against this sham life has led in News from Nowhere the radical change is, of course, that all this misuse of work has been abolished. People no longer make unnecessary things and so find time to make the necessary things well. And the very act of doing this has brought a strange new exultation into their lives, and once again human nature has come into its own unbridled expression. They still have their troubles, their love-quarrels, 'the folly which comes by nature, the unwisdom of the immature man, or the older men caught in a trap,' the anxiety of the mother as to her children—'they may indeed turn out better or worse; they may disappoint her highest hopes; such anxieties as these are a part of the mingled pleasure and pain which goes to make up the life of mankind,'—but they are free of the cares of a time when the aim of men's work was to come uppermost in competition and not to make the work its own joy and reward. The men and women still have their difficult sex problems to solve, but they do not complicate them by wilful neglect of obvious facts; they recognize for instance that a man or a woman may love quite genuinely and tire and even love again as at first, and if a match does not turn out well, they break it and shake off the grief 'in a way which perhaps the sentimentalists of other times would think contemptible and unheroic, but which we think necessary and manlike.' Their acceptance of these natural facts does not mean that they live in a state of disorganized and capricious relationship. Faithful love is a common enough condition among them, but they are not unwise enough to suppose that when it is not present its place can be satisfactorily and wholesomely taken by an artificial pretence. Finding this joy in the work of their hands, and seeing no end to work other than that joy, they have lost all jealousy of the work of their fellows, and every man is encouraged to the best that is in him by common consent and approval. Infinite variety has taken the place of monotony, and one man's pleasure in another's achievement the place of fear that it may mean loss to himself. Hammond can say—

We live amidst beauty without fear of becoming effeminate, ... we have plenty to do, and on the whole enjoy doing it. What more can we ask of life?

What indeed? It must be remembered that he says 'we.' The delight is complete only because it is common to all.

'In time past, indeed, men were told to love their kind, to believe in the religion of humanity and so forth. But look you, just in the degree that a man had elevation of mind and refinement enough to be able to value this idea was he repelled by the obvious aspect of the individuals composing the mass which he was to worship; and he could only evade that repulsion by making a conventional abstraction of mankind that had little actual or historical relation to the race, which to his eyes was divided into blind tyrants on the one hand and apathetic degraded slaves on the other. But now, where is the difficulty in accepting the religion of humanity, when the men and women who go to make up humanity are free, happy, and energetic at least, and most commonly beautiful of body also, and surrounded by beautiful things of their own fashioning, and a nature bettered and not worsened by contact with mankind?'

That was Morris's clear conviction as to the whole question, and the word that he uses to describe the new meaning of work—that is the remedy of all the social evils against which he was in revolt—is art.

This, then, was the creed and the hope that Morris set out in detail in News from Nowhere. That the dream was farther from realization than he thought may be the unhappy truth, but of this at least we are sure, that he dreamt a good thing. The picture that he shows us is of healthy, aspiring, joyous men and women, full of sweet humour and clean passion, who, far from having lost all incentive to endeavour, have found a new and tremendous cause for endeavour in every hour of the day. For them work and worship have become one, and of the union has come life. The prose that Morris uses is beautiful because perfectly adapted to its purpose. In the practical discussions on particular questions the style is swift and incisive; in the descriptions of the life of his new world it is coloured by all his tenderness and love for men and natural beauty. 'The earth and the growth and the life of it! If I could but say or show how I love it!' It is a cry always ready upon his lips. And he brings to his work here, too, a charming and whimsical humour. The little sketch of that wonderful person the Golden Dustman is a master-stroke of genuinely human comedy. And the humour may be leavened with admirable satire; he has in his mind a certain day in Trafalgar Square, when 'unarmed and peaceable people were attacked by ruffians armed with bludgeons.' 'And they put up with that?' says Dick—

'We had to put up with it; we couldn't help it.'

The old man looked at me keenly and said: 'You seem to know a great deal about it, neighbour! And is it really true that nothing came of it?'

'This came of it,' said I, 'that a good many people were sent to prison because of it.'

'What, of the bludgeoners?' said the old man. 'Poor devils!'

'No, no,' said I, 'of the bludgeoned.'

Said the old man rather severely: 'Friend, I expect that you have been reading some rotten collection of lies, and have been taken in by it too easily.'

The book has been described, quite aptly, as insular. In its atmosphere and colour it is essentially English. The accounts of a reconstructed London and a cleansed countryside, of the great Thames reaches and the stone buildings of the Cotswolds, of the happy and generous but rather silent folk, of their traditions and customs and their characteristics, are all written by an Englishman of Englishmen and their country. Their natures have not been fundamentally changed, but stripped of the excrescences of an effete and degraded society, and they are still drawn in their proper relation to their native landscape. They are the clearly wrought ideal of our race, but they have left in them nothing of those products of our race who consistently confuse expediency with ethical fitness, sentimentalism with passion, and celebrate the planting of the British flag in all sorts of places where it is not in the least wanted by calling themselves God's Englishmen.

VII PROSE ROMANCES AND POEMS BY THE WAY

During the later years of his life, when he was distracted by the many claims of his active socialism and constantly harassed by details of organization and the efforts to reconcile people who, having the same interests, persisted in misunderstanding each other, Morris wrote a series of prose romances that hold a distinctive place in his art. His long poems show us a life conceived on lines that I have sought to trace, approached in a mood of austere responsibility and defined with all the completeness that he could bring to work. In these prose romances the life is unchanged, but it is seen through a different mood. It is as though he turned aside from the stress of his daily work to the world that his imagination had already created as the only sane one for men, and saw it with a kind of new leisureliness and wholesome irresponsibility. It was impossible for him to allow fancy to intrude upon the life that he desired to the exclusion of any of its vital qualities, but, as far as was possible without such offence to his artistic conscience, in these romances he indulged his faculty for story-telling without curb. The people and their adventures and characters are still, as in the poems, related continuously to Morris's radical conception of life, but they are no longer related to any central purpose contained in the work of art itself. The waywardness and profuseness of romanticism are here carried to their extreme limits, and yet we never feel that the narratives are formless, so powerful and fixed is the vision through which Morris draws them into unity. The justification of his indifference to the ordinary demands of construction in a book like The Roots of the Mountains, is that we do not feel that the work would gain in any way were he scrupulously careful in this matter. Morris had created a world in his imagination, just and beautiful as it seemed to him. From that world he drew the substance of his great poems, reducing it to the essential and symbolic terms of art. Jason and The Earthly Paradise and Sigurd are all perfectly constructed results of the submission of this world to the severe process of artistic selection. But in the later prose romances we are led into the very world itself from which these things were drawn, and given leave to wander through it as we will. We find that it is cosmic as life is cosmic, but it is not yet wrought into the stricter proportions of art. If we can think of Morris writing through another generation, it is impossible to believe that he would have turned again, say, to the Volsung story; that he had shaped finally in Sigurd the Volsung; but we feel that he might have found material in these romances for poem after poem, that, indeed, they are, as it were, a panoramic expression of the world from which his poems must inevitably be imagined. There is in them nothing of inconsistency, but there is a prodigal diffuseness that belongs rather to nature than to art. They are the storehouse from which Morris's own art was drawn, and poets to come may yet turn to them as they do to Malory or as Morris himself did to the Sagas.

The choice of prose for these romances was, for this reason, not in any way arbitrary but the result of sound artistic deliberation. Where Morris used the same material and crystallized it through his finest imaginative impulse, verse was the natural and inevitable medium; but he is here showing us the material before it had been subjected to this highest creative energy, and there is not the spiritual fusion that makes verse necessary to complete expression. The prose that he uses is stamped always with his personality, and so justifies itself even where most open to criticism. It is commonly of extraordinary beauty, full of the gravity and high manners that belong to the heroic atmosphere of the stories themselves; and even where the adaptation of an archaic method of speech is most pronounced it is not self-conscious. All language is dependent largely on convention, and that Morris used a convention that was not generally accepted was a virtue in workmanship rather than a vice. The important thing is that he was consistent in the use, or, in other words, that his convention was never a mannerism but definitely a corporate part of his style.

These stories are but another instance of the remarkable range of Morris's artistic power. They do not, of course, rank with his own most splendid work, but in a particular kind of prose romance they attain an excellence that had not been known in England for several centuries. And in the ease with which they hold our interest in the story and at the same time maintain a perfect consistency of character, they show that, had he chosen, Morris might have added yet another to his many achievements, and challenged comparison with the best of Fielding's successors. The Bride and the Sunbeam, Face-of-God and Walter and Folk-Might, and, above all, Dallach, are drawn with that certainty and depth of understanding of the individual that are perhaps the chief distinction of the youngest of the literary arts in England.

In 1891 Morris's last book of poems, Poems By The Way, was published by the Kelmscott Press. In it the poet gathered together some fifty of his shorter poems written at intervals during the thirty years since the publication of The Defence of Guenevere, and there are naturally in the volume a wide range of subjects and much diversity of manner. Fragments from rejected or unfinished tales intended for The Earthly Paradise, fine echoes and memories of his Icelandic studies and travel, lyrical expressions of this mood or that, translations from the Flemish and Danish and his beloved saga-tongue, fairy tales, chants that grew out of his socialism, and a few poems that show that when he chose to apply his poetic vision to modern conditions he could do so with profound penetration, are brought together almost at haphazard. If, as Mr. Arthur Symons says, a pageant is a shining disorder, then this book is truly a pageant. And yet behind all these expressions of many times and moods is to be seen the central impulse of Morris's life knitting them together into a clear spiritual unity. It seems a far cry from the delicate tenderness of 'From the Upland to the Sea' to the passion of 'Mother and Son,' from the sombre brooding of 'To the Muse of the North' to the airy romance of 'Goldilocks and Goldilocks,' yet they are all unmistakably begotten of the same temperament. The high reverence for naked life, the insistence on labour being joyful if it was not to be abominable, the fierce worship of beauty and the courageous acceptance of its passing, these were the things by which Morris had his being, and they are woven into all the pages of his last book. He was a man who took literally no thought as to the relation of the work in hand to that of years passed. A story is told of him that when a friend who was helping him to collect the material for Poems By The Way brought a poem to him he could not remember having written a line of it. The perfect consistency of his aim and temper from first to last is the more remarkable in consequence, and the kinship between two fragmentary expressions of his life, divided perhaps by thirty years, is fine to see. His understanding of the ideal towards which he strove became clearer as he passed through his strenuous existence, and his powers of realizing it in his art matured steadily to the end, but the ideal itself was unchanged. That in an artist is a splendid thing: a thing that perhaps of all others is the token of his divinity. For it is that central certainty of purpose that is immortal in him, austerely set above the change of circumstance. The form of his art may pass from its first imitative and awkward groping slowly to its perfection or it may prove itself at the beginning, but it is the great guiding purpose that he cannot gain by seeking, and that lends truth to the common phrase.

Of certain of the poems no more than a word need be said, whilst others need to be considered more fully. The northern poems, such as 'Gunnar's Howe' and 'Of the Wooing of Hallbiorn' and those belonging to the Earthly Paradise period are beautiful strays from phases of the poet's work that have already been discussed. Here and there we find a deliberate return to an earlier manner, as in 'The Hall and the Wood,' written in 1890, where many of the devices used in the Guenevere volume are again employed and with even greater success. Here, for example, is a beautiful reminiscence of lines already quoted—

The short lyrics, 'Love's Gleaning Tide,' 'Spring's Bedfellow,' 'Pain and Time Strive Not,' and two or three others, have just that intangible beauty that makes lyrical poetry at once unforgettable and impossible to discuss in any detail. In one of them, 'The Garden by the Sea,' which is the lovely song from the Hylas episode in Jason, Morris altered three lines, not, I think, for the better. The fairy poem 'Goldilocks and Goldilocks' is play, but the play of a great poet. Then we have the charming verses written for tapestries and pictures, slight enough and yet struck by Morris's unerring instinct into sparks of poetry. This of the Vine—

and this of the Mulberry Tree—

are perfect of their kind. There remain two groups, both inspired more or less by the same impulse, but differing a good deal in their artistic value. The first of these consists of poems written directly to embody the principles of active socialism that absorbed the greater part of his energy in later life; it includes 'All for the Cause,' 'The Day is Coming,' and 'The Voice of Toil' among others. Here again Morris proved his incapacity to write verse that was not poetry, but he gets nearer to the border-line at times in these poems than he does anywhere else in his work; he is, however, still well on the right side. 'All for the Cause' is a fine direct challenge to the workers to assert their own lives, but the challenge is made to all that is best in their nature, even to the best of that nature that the poet hopes will yet be fostered in them. 'The Day is Coming' has a strong vein of irony in it that looks a little strange in Morris's verse, and yet it is admirably managed—

The tremendous sincerity that induced an artist so sensitive to the proper uses of his art to press it into the service of a cause to which he had linked his life is in itself a justification of the result. The higher qualities of his imagination may be momentarily set aside, but the thing is nevertheless afire; it burns with conviction. The optimism that disgusts us is the optimism that is not in direct relation to effort. The sacrifices that Morris was making to his socialism in the practical conduct of his life were reflected quite clearly in the spirit of these poems and quickened it. It is said that this poetry was written for the occasion, but it must be remembered that the occasion was one knit into the very fibre of the poet's being. A curious poem which belongs to this group is 'The God of the Poor,' the first draft of which was written about 1870 or earlier. A simple story of allegorical cast, telling of the overcoming of the oppressor of the people, Maltete, by their deliverer Boncoeur, it is interesting as showing a definite attitude in the poet's mind towards these problems years before he sought actively to deal with them.

In the second of the groups of which I speak are six or seven poems that deal with some particular rather than general aspect of life. 'Hope Dieth: Love Liveth' and 'Error and Loss' touch remote, though essential, aspects of the psychology of love, if I may use the phrase, with a subtlety that was one of Browning's peculiar distinctions. The endurance of love when everything, even hope, is lost, and the pathos of the defeat of love's end by mere chance, have never been handled with greater poignancy and insight. 'Of The Three Seekers' lacks this depth of vision, and states rather than convinces, though there is that habitual simplicity of Morris in the statement that gives it its own value. In 'Drawing Near the Light' we have lyrical expression of a universal mood drawn into contact with a particular state. It may be quoted in full—

There is here a suggestion of the application of Morris's whole poetic vision to the concrete affairs of his socialism that found its supreme achievement in the three magnificent poems, 'The Message of the March Wind,' 'Mother and Son' and 'The Half of Life Gone.' In these poems the contemplation of life amid the conflicting currents that spring from a particular phase in the evolution of civilization rather than from the fundamental sources of humanity is lifted into the highest regions of poetry. They stand apart from, though not above, the rest of Morris's work, and are indirectly an emphatic vindication of his general method. What that method was we have examined already, but in these poems he gave final proof that if he chose to bring his art into superficial and obvious relation with the localized conditions of his time he could do so as admirably as any man. That with the consciousness of this power in himself he deliberately chose the other method in the great mass of his work is the reply to his critics who suggest that he turned away from his own time in his art because he was not stirred to any real imaginative understanding of it.

'The Message of the March Wind' is the complete expression of the central tenet of his socialistic creed. The poet—or the speaker—is keenly responsive to the things that Morris held to be alone of worth in life. He is among the green beauty of earth in the springtide; the woman he loves with him. They have wandered

and now they stand in the twilight, looking down the white road before them, where

They are in the full content of their love and the sweetness of the earth, and then—

The contrast is thus imagined, and leads the poet into a direct statement of his understanding of the whole problem. He never flattered the people for whom he was working into the belief that the great unleavened majority had the wisdom of the world on its side. His rejection of that idea was as emphatic as Ibsen's. What he sought was to make them realize the fact themselves. He did not tell them that they were fitted for the great simple joys of life, but that they had the right to be so fitted, and that it was in themselves alone to assert that right. His aim was to make them discontented with themselves and the ugliness of their own lives, knowing that once this was done the rest would inevitably follow. And he realized, on the other hand, that the life which he worshipped was made impossible and all its virtue destroyed simply by the surroundings that by some obscure process of evil had established themselves on earth. The happiness of the speaker and his lover in this fresh beauty of the spring twilight was the outcome not of any inherent virtue of their own, but of the mere chance of their escape from this disease of circumstance.

The poem takes up, with exquisite tenderness, the hope that these people over whom the March wind has passed will yet awaken from their sleep of degradation, and turns back again to the quiet peace of the village inn with the 'lights and the fire,'

The whole poem is one more witness to the sovereignty of art. The deepest social difficulty of our time is here drawn through the meshes of the artist's imagination and, purged of everything inessential, set out in vibrating colour and line far more appealing and convincing than all the statistical statements of the lords of rule. The failure of our modern legislation to realize the value of art in any hope of national regeneration is not the least of its blunders. Artists have, happily, escaped from the patronage of courts, but until the propagandists rediscover the fact that they must bring back the artists to their help, not as servants but as fellow labourers, they will not work wisely. The artists continue their labour, building some beauty in the world. That labour can be directed by no one but themselves, but it is at their peril that the workers who are striving, earnestly enough, towards a better hope refuse to throw the creations of the artist into the balance with their own endeavour. To bring poetry to the issue of a definite social problem, is, unfortunately, thought of as mere idleness. But let 'The Message of the March Wind' be delivered to the people up and down the land, as systematically if need be as the demand for rent or taxes, and it will be heard willingly enough, and when it is heard there will be new life among us. I speak in metaphors, but there may be method even in a metaphor. For 'The Message of the March Wind' might bring people in turn to The Earthly Paradise, and then the aim of Morris's art—of all art—would be understood by the world.

'Mother and Son' is wider than 'The Message of the March Wind' in its scope inasmuch as it deals with a subject less peculiar to a particular generation or age, narrower in that it is concerned with one definite event instead of general conditions. A woman is speaking to her love-child. To analyse the poem would be to quote it almost line by line, but the conflict of the very roots of humanity with the blind dictates of circumstance, the tenderness of motherhood and the wistful yearning of a soul crossed in an uncharitable social scheme could scarcely find an expression more purely poetic. And 'The Half of Life Gone' touches this conflict with equal vigour and pity.

Reading these poems we are glad that Morris ordered his art as he did. Beautiful as they are and perfectly as they show the possibility of bringing all things into the purifying influence of the imaginative faculty, they yet leave us with an exultation that has in it some strain of despondency. Through no fault in the poet's working there is somewhere a flaw in the crystal. We thank him for showing us these things as we had not seen them before, but he has already tutored us too well. We turn back to the life that he has already made necessary to our being in the quiet ways of The Earthly Paradise and the great wind-swept world of Sigurd the Volsung.

VIII CONCLUSION

To enquire whether Marlowe was a greater poet than Milton or Milton a greater than Keats is but to juggle with words and to spin them into nothingness. It is enough that all were great. It is no honour to the giants of the earth to pit them one against another for our sport. That Morris was or was not the greatest poet of his age or century is a matter of complete unimportance upon which nothing depends. The supremely important thing, the splendid circumstance, is that here again in due season was a man unmistakably moulded in heroic proportions, one claiming and proving kinship with the masters whose names are but few. If humanity was fortunate enough to see others of his peers in his own day we can but be thankful for grace so prodigal; but, however that may be, here at least was one establishing anew the proudest succession of mankind. The creator of Sigurd the Volsung and so much more that is compact of sane and wholesome magnificence has his rightful company, and it may well be the gladdest boast of the world that he has; but in that company there are no degrees. Æschylus, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Beethoven, Wagner, Shelley, Wordsworth—there is an inspiration to the lips in the very names of these men and their fellows, but there must be no disputation as to the headship in their presence; they themselves will but laugh if they heed us at all. And Morris is, as I see him, clearly of that fellowship. By some strange generosity of nature he was not only allowed to give great poetry to the world, but also to readjust for us the significance of life in phases a little lower than the highest. It happened that a man who had the profoundest sense of the real nature of circumstance and conditions in his generation could enforce his direct and practical teaching by a creative imagination of the highest order. It would, perhaps, be fitter to say that in this man a supreme creative faculty was allied to another faculty that enabled him to interpret his imaginative art to the world in terms of immediate practice. The result of this is that although the indirect influence of his creative art—and that is always the profoundest influence in these things—is neither more nor less definable than that of other men of an equal power, his direct influence not upon abstract or scientific thought but upon the spiritual perception of men, has perhaps been more instant and far-reaching than that of any man in the history of English genius. It is, indeed, difficult to find anywhere a precise parallel to the curious phenomenon that was Morris. Experience proves the advent of a great poet to be apparently capricious, the unconsidered whim of powers that make but little distinction of seasons. The "Songs of Innocence" were quite definitely sung in the wilderness. But that manifestation of genius which covers a range wider than its own finest creation, and takes on something of universality in pervading itself not only with its own life but with the life of the world, would seem to be reserved for days that mark the culmination of some memorable epoch of imaginative activity, and in itself to be the crowning expression of such days. Michael Angelo and Shakespeare came at times when national life had been running with rare spiritual force for some years; when, that is to say, the world was cherishing beauty and had rich gifts to offer such men when they arose. The great word was but seeking a voice, and it is difficult to dissociate Michael Angelo from the impulse of Renaissance Italy, or Shakespeare from the impulse of Elizabethan England. The mighty utterance of these men was their own, wrought into its perfection by their separate and distinctive temperaments; of the essential isolation of the artist I have already spoken. But it is nevertheless an utterance in some measure made possible by the currents of the time in which it came and one for which an examination of the immediately preceding years prepares us. These men are exultant figures challenging the world for ever from heights that they did not build unaided. This, of course, does not effect their achievement, and the subordination of many splendid forces to one supreme end is, perhaps, the highest exercise of the faculty of design in the cosmic genius. The coming of such men is not less moving because it seems to be inevitable, but that it does seem inevitable is clear. There are, too, times when men move, as it were, in a kind of receptive stupor, times when great forces are latent in their midst; it is possible for a man of this imaginative universality to arrive at such a time without any apparent preparation in the days before him, and, being at once the pioneer and culmination of a new era, yet not to excite our astonishment as well as our worship, because the time, although lending him no impulse, at least offers him no resistance. The world could not be said to be expecting Goethe or—Collins and Gray notwithstanding—Wordsworth, and yet we are not surprised when we come to these men, because we have been moving through darkness between light and light, and have been expecting any new and sudden revelation that might be made—expecting to be surprised. Goethe and Wordsworth, unlike Michael Angelo and Shakespeare, did not appear as the final and perfect articulation of a word passed freely from lip to lip by their fellows, but they were at least allowed to speak without any violent denial being implicit in the whole intellectual and spiritual and artistic attitude of their time. Having the revelation of new temperaments to make, they found, inevitably, isolated voices of criticism against them, but, save for these, the age, although not demanding them as the logical issue of its own effort, at least did not appear to be essentially unfitted to produce them. Lyrical Ballads was printed at a time that had no deliberate artistic purpose of its own, but was, nevertheless, ripe for some new and striking manifestation of the spirit of man. The night had already lasted over-long. Wordsworth, it is true, came strangely early in the new day, but although the great voice in the dawn was unusual, it was not amazing.

These men, it would seem then, are to be looked for in a time that either demands them for its own sublimated utterance or is at least negatively ready to receive them. Morris, however, whose genius was distinguished clearly by this universality, not only was not the essential figure of a great movement that had grown before and about him, but he came at a time that, far from demanding him as its natural fulfilment, was not even waiting to receive any new impression that might be struck upon it. When Tennyson had sounded his clearest music and Browning had wrought his subtlest perceptions into poetry, it was felt that the highest achievement of a new age had been reached. Then when the wonderful second summer of the romantic revival seemed to be exhausted, Swinburne gave to it a new term of strong life. Taking all the material that the new poetry had used since the first beginnings over a hundred years earlier, he blended it with his own temperament and gift of speech and, when men looked for no more than the quiet lapse into imitation and echoes, he showed it to be capable of an added and ringing significance that had been wholly unexpected. Taking language at the value that use had allotted to it, he not only retained the poetry that had already been found in those values but made it clear that no one had wrung the full measure of poetry from them. After this piling of crest above crest no further great expression could justly be looked for until in due time a fresh impulse had been fostered to its full strength. The Victorian development of romantic poetry had reached its splendid final achievement, and quiet if not wholly songless years would have been the natural succession. And yet, at the very time that Swinburne was lending this last glory to the marvellous epoch of which Collins had been the herald, another poet was already announcing a new day with the authentic voice of a master. The eternal impulse that conspired with Morris's own vision to create his poetry is, perhaps, more difficult to define than in the case of any other poet. It certainly is not to be found in his own age, and although to say that he sought to continue the mediæval tradition may account for much in his literary form, it does not help very greatly in the understanding of his spiritual temper. The fact is that in its fundamental qualities Morris's art came as near as any art can do to being unaffected by any external impulse at all. His love for certain aspects of mediævalism did not prevent him from reaching far beyond them both in the construction and the philosophy of his art. The quality in mediæval art that chiefly attracted him was its direct simplicity, and this quality he took up into his own work. Instead of using words for their cumulative poetic value he threw poetry over words that had hitherto gone naked. Apart from a few of his early poems and the use that he makes of models from time to time in verse forms, there is scarcely any evidence in the manner of his work that he had ever read any of the poetry before him. Reducing life to its simplest equation, he embodied it in an utterance as simple. But, in its interpretation of life, the world that he created was rather a world of the future than a world of the past, and it incorporates the essence of the spiritual and intellectual experience of the ages that had passed between, say, Chaucer and his own day. The intensity of his vision and the certainty with which he disentangled the essential from the ephemeral forced in him an utterance of a nature not unlike that of the earlier masters whom he was never tired of praising, but it is a mistake to suppose that he saw the history of the world shorn of five centuries. He was not misled into thinking that the fundamental meaning of life had changed, but he knew that man's power of adjusting his understanding to that meaning develops and is increased by the succession of prophetic voices, and in assimilating the cumulative growth of this power he was modern in the only worthy and valuable way. He applied a definitely modern faculty of analysis and definition to the permanent things of life, and embodied it in an utterance that was clearly his own but coloured in the shaping by a mediæval rather than any other influence.

That such a poet should come was in itself not remarkable, but that he should come at such a moment was a phenomenon scarcely to be paralleled in literature. The current tradition of poetry when he was writing was not only hostile to his method, but in a negative way it had helped to make the age one peculiarly unfitted for his message. The eager selfishness of the new scientific thought had paid but little attention to the social ideal for which Morris stood. This neglect the poets had either flattered or, certainly, had not opposed, and the result was that at a time when poetry was passing through one of its most memorable epochs, the life of the people was suffused with vulgarity and meanness. Neither art nor science, whatever else they might be doing, realized that the basis of a wholesome national life is a delight among the people in their daily labour. The people did not discover this for themselves, and when Morris wanted to furnish his rooms he was forced to make his own chairs and tables. His work henceforward was to show his age its errors on the one hand in his social teaching, and on the other in his poetry and craftsmanship to announce its possibilities. This was a perfectly natural result of the influence of the conditions that surrounded him upon his own creative impulse, but how that impulse came to birth among such conditions must remain a splendid perplexity. Morris's work was directed to certain ends by the requirements of his age, but his spirit was one to which the age had no logical claim. He came not in due time but by some large generosity of the gods.

When a great poet comes not unexpectedly but as the natural and full development of a long tradition, it is easy not only to estimate the positive value of his own achievement, but also to trace or even to predict his influence upon his successors. New poets will come, possessing some measure of genuine inspiration, and carry the tradition through to its quiet and often lovely close; they will take their honourable places about the few commanding figures, worthy of their kinship and proud of it. But when the great poet happens to be at the beginning instead of at the full day of an epoch, we can but await the event. Morris not only discovered a new world in his art, but he was allowed to explore and establish it. His word was not one of rumour and promise alone, but more or less of fulfilment. Strands of his influence have already been drawn through the art and life of his followers, but the work that has been done in deliberate imitation of his is scarcely recognizable as such. A poet may imitate Tennyson with some success because he may inherit the same tradition that shaped Tennyson; the impulse is already in his blood towards the expression and temper of which his model is the consummation. But there is no such tradition behind Morris; his art was in a peculiar degree the creation of his own vision alone, and that is a thing which is beyond imitation. The new tradition that Morris himself began may or may not be carried along a clear line of progression, but it can only be taken up in its full compass by a poet that shall be not far short of Morris's own stature, and by the time he comes it is possible that the influence of the author of Sigurd may have done its work by operating indirectly through many new movements rather than through a direct succession of its own begetting. If this should happen, Morris's influence will be no less valuable a force in the world, but it is not unlikely that when the history of poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries comes to be written, he will stand as a lonely titanic figure, excelled by none in the depth and range of his art, but outside any categorical lines of development.

About Morris's own attitude towards his art a good deal of nonsense has been written. It appears, for example, that he once, in a moment of irresponsible conversation, said that poetry was 'tommy rot.' The remark had, of course, the exact value of all such small talk, but it is the kind of thing that has been solemnly advanced as a proof that he was primarily what is commonly called a man of action, who wrote poetry as a pleasant recreation. The truth is, of course, that Morris was a great artist, and knew that he was a great artist. That, to him, was the supremely important thing, because his art meant for him the sweetest and noblest life that he could perceive through his imagination. As a man of action he proved himself fully when occasion arose, but he undertook his propagandist work with reluctance and often turned from it in disgust. It was not that he was ever for a moment in doubt as to the excellence of the end at which such work was aiming, but that he knew that his own great work in the world, the work by which he could most effectually help it a little towards that end, was his art. To suggest that the man who created Jason and The Earthly Paradise, Sigurd and Love is Enough had anything but the profoundest reverence for his art, and especially for the supreme expression of his art—poetry—would be a preposterous insult if it were not ludicrous. Art was his gospel, and all his social teaching and activity were but an effort to bring his gospel to pass upon earth.

We can imagine a race that had attained a wisdom fuller than has yet been found, adopting one simple form of daily supplication. Always from the people's lips this prayer should go up, "Lord, give us character." Character. That is the supreme need of man, and it is simply the faculty of being himself and expressing himself in all the conduct of his life. He may not be a very great man, or a very wise man, or even a very good man, but if he be himself he may, in some measure he must, become these. There is, at the outset, the necessity of material opportunity for so being himself. One who is overworked, or employed all the while in degrading work, or insufficiently paid for his work, one who is, in short, driven, cannot be himself, just as the man who is denied the chance of working at all cannot be himself. But, given the material opportunity, the power of proving his character, of asserting his individuality, of being himself, is inherent in every man. And this Morris felt with the whole energy of his being. He saw men having no adventurousness in their own spirits, dulled by routine, and with their own wills bent and impoverished by the will of some one else, degraded into mere echoes and reflections. He saw that the crying need of the world was character, and he sought to teach men that in bringing back joy to their daily work they would put their feet on the first step towards the only true dignity and pride of life. The satisfaction that comes of a piece of work truly done and having in it something of the soul of the worker was, to him, a holy thing. His own craftsmanship and manufacture were the expression of a man with this conviction; his imaginative writing was of a world peopled by such men. The spiritual exaltation of which I have spoken, the finer tissue of some mysterious emotional experience that is laid over the definable substance of poetry, is always in his work, translating its message into the imaginative terms of art; but the message itself is perfectly articulated, and it is one of the profoundest and most inspiriting that it has been given to any man to deliver. Other poets have given us courage to face a world fallen into uncharitable ways, or directed us to secluded places where we may forget the dust and trouble of a life that we must accept as an unfortunate necessity, or given good promise of revelation and comfort in a life to come; but none has ever announced so clearly as Morris the hope of life here upon earth. Cloistered quiet was an impossible state to this man who so loved fellowship, and the world beyond death he was content to leave to its own proving. But he did not endeavour to encourage men to face the life that he knew was unwholesome and draining them of freedom and manhood; he cried to them to destroy it and he showed them in his art the life that might be theirs in its stead.

The basis of Morris's social creed was an unchanging faith in the essential dignity of the nature of man. The trickeries and jealousies that beset our commercial phase of civilization he refused to accept as being fundamental in humanity, thinking of them rather as ill habits imposed upon humanity by some cruel sport of circumstance that made men forgetful of their own better instincts. He did not suppose that habits that had been slowly assimilated could be put off in a moment of violent reaction, but he never doubted if once men could be brought to consider the real purpose of traffic and social community, and so free themselves from a tyranny that endured only because part of its method was to carry its victims along in a continuous necessity of adjusting themselves to the immediate moment without allowing them to pause for reflection and see life in its completeness, that then these habits would inevitably be set aside. His desire always was that men should at least be allowed to prove themselves freely. From the turbulent passions and sorrows inseparable from humanity he asked no escape, taking them gladly as the darker threads in the many-coloured web of our heritage, but he denounced fiercely the doctrine that, finding men forced into daily betrayal of themselves, blandly announced that here was proof of their radical meanness and unworth. For the people who told him that before he could hope for the world of his imagining he must change human nature, he had a fine contempt. That this cleaner life was realizable on earth, and that without any revolutionary excesses, he showed as clearly in the work of his own life as any one man could do. He conducted a large business enterprise profitably and in open competition, but he did not degrade labour in employing it. He accepted the normal conditions of society in public and family life, but he did not allow them to cramp or violate his own personality. He realized fully that a great social fabric is not constructed out of mere unreason, and he had no wish to destroy systems that had been evolved from perfectly sound impulses; the thing that he fought against with all his extraordinary power was their abuse. Principles of exchange and of labour for the common good were a necessary complement of his belief that a man must get from his labour two things: joy in the work itself and the means whereby to live; but he knew that the real significance of these principles had been forgotten. His life was an active endeavour to impress it once again on the mind of the people, and in his poetry was the same endeavour embodied in creative imagination.

Writing of the northern stories Morris said, 'Well, sometimes we must needs think that we shall live again; yet if that were not, would it not be enough that we helped to make this unnameable glory, and lived not altogether deedless? Think of the joy we have in praising great men, and how we turn their stories over and over, and fashion their lives for our joy: and this also we ourselves may give to the world.' It was curiously prophetic of that which we feel about Morris himself. His life, his art, the figure of the man, all fit into the outlines of a heroic story such as those that he loved. He gave, indeed, to the world in this manner and in large measure. And he added generously to the joy that we have in praising great men.

THE END

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH