WILLIAM MORRIS

A CRITICAL STUDY

BY

JOHN DRINKWATER

LONDON MARTIN SECKER NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI MCMXII

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

POEMS OF MEN AND HOURS, 1911 COPHETUA. A Play in One Act, 1911 POEMS OF LOVE AND EARTH, 1912 ETC.

TO ERNEST NEWMAN Who Loves the Arts With a Just and Fine Impatience

NOTE

A few paragraphs in this book are reprinted, by permission of Messrs. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., from introductions written for The Muses' Library; others, by permission of the Editor, from articles contributed to The Nation.

My thanks are due to William Morris's Trustees for permission to use such quotations from his works as I wished, and to Miss May Morris for her generous assistance in this and other matters. My indebtedness to Mr. Mackail I have acknowledged in more than one place in the body of this volume, but I should like here to emphasize my appreciation of the service that he has done to all who reverence Morris and his work.

I would also thank my friend, Mr. Oliver W. F. Lodge, for the many delightful hours that I have spent with him in talking of a poet whom we both love. What understanding I may have of Morris has been deepened and quickened by his enthusiasm and fine judgment. No thanks that I might offer to another friend could be in any way adequate; in inscribing this book to him I can but make slight acknowledgment of one of those whole-hearted services that stand for so much in the craft of letters.

J. D.

Birmingham, 1912.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY EARLY POEMS AND PROSE INTERLUDE NARRATIVE POEMS LOVE IS ENOUGH AND SIGURD THE VOLSUNG TRANSLATIONS AND SOCIALISM PROSE ROMANCES AND POEMS BY THE WAY CONCLUSION

I INTRODUCTORY

To the isolation, the loneliness, of the poet, criticism is apt to give far less than due heed. At a time when literature is daily becoming more responsive to the new spirit which we call Democracy, such a complaint may seem to be reactionary in temper, and some explanation may be made by way of defence against any such possible charge. Nothing is more disastrous to a poet than that he should dissociate his art from the life of the world; until the conflict and destiny of humanity have become the subjects of his contemplation he cannot hope to bring to his creation that vitality which alone makes for permanence. Ultimately it is the great normal life of mankind which is immortal, and the perishable things are the grotesque, the odd, the experiences which are incomplete because they are unrelated to the general experience. But whilst the insistence that the poet should be swiftly responsive to the life about him is perfectly just, indeed inevitable in any right understanding of art, it is equally necessary to remember always that the poet's vision itself is turned upon life from places remote and untrodden, that the seasons of his contemplation are seasons of seclusion. To say that the poet is the product of his age is to be deceived by one of the most dangerous of critical half-truths. The poet is the product of his own temperament and personality, or he is nothing. Clearly, if the age in which the poet lived were in any wide sense his creator, the poets of an age would bear unmistakable tokens of their relationship. The perfectly obvious fact that they do not do so is, however, no obstacle to the criticism that wishes to satisfy its own primary assumption that with the age does remain this supreme function of making its own poets. Recognizing that its theory demands the presence of such affinity in its support, this criticism proceeds, in violation of the most direct evidence, to discover the necessary likeness. Perhaps the crowning achievement of this ineptitude is the constant coupling of the names of Tennyson and Browning. If ever two poets were wholly unrelated to each other in their reading of life and spiritual temper, they were the poets of "In Memoriam" and "Pippa Passes," of "Crossing the Bar" and "Prospice." But the accident of their being contemporaries is taken as sufficient reason for endless comparisons and complacent decisions as to their relative greatness, leading nowhere and establishing nothing. And parallel cases are common enough: Gray and Collins, Shelley and Keats, and, in daily practice, any one poet and any other whose books happen to be on the table at the same moment.

The relation of the age to its poets is that of sunlight to a landscape. The trees and the rivers, the hills and the plains, all turn to the same source for the power whereby to express themselves, the same light is upon them all. But no one thinks in consequence of comparing Snowdon with the Thames. Without his age a poet cannot speak, but the thing that his age empowers him to utter is that which is within him. His song, if it be a song of worth, is a manifestation apart from the age, from everything whatever save his own spiritual distinction. In this sense the poet must always be isolated and lonely, and it is solely by divining the secrets of this isolation and loneliness, not concerning itself unduly with circumstantial kinship in expression that may exist between one poet and another, that criticism may justify itself. Occasionally a poet may arise whose faculty has a vital sympathy with another's, whose vision may accord in some measure with that of one perhaps centuries dead. Then enquiry as to the affinity is likely to be fruitful. The poet is not so much a reflection of his age as a commentary upon it and its attitude towards life. Twenty poets may be writing together, the age reacting upon their creative energy in every instance, but it is more than probable that the essential significance of their work will be alike in no two cases. So that in writing about Morris my purpose is chiefly to discover what are the aim and ultimate achievement of his artistic activity; in a smaller degree to ascertain what was his relation to his age; to compare him with his contemporary creators scarcely at all, believing such comparisons to be misguided in intention and negative in result.

To attempt a new definition of poetry is a task sufficiently uninviting. And yet it is well to be clear in one's own mind, or as clear as possible, as to what one is writing about. If I try to set down, with as little vagueness as may be, the nature of my conception of the meaning of poetry, I do so in all humility, not in any way suggesting that here at last the eternal riddle has been solved, but merely to define the point from which I start, the standard which I have in mind. It is certain that each man of intelligence and fine feeling will make his own demand as to the values of poetry. A man's worship is directed at last by his needs, and it is as vain in art as in life to seek to impose a love where there is no corresponding receptivity, assuming, of course a quick intelligence and not one stupefied. A man spiritually asleep may be awakened, but once awake his adventures must be chiefly controlled by himself. Fitzgerald was a man of taste and understanding, but he did not care for Homer and found The Life and Death of Jason 'no go.' Arnold was as passionate a man as might be in his allegiance to art, notwithstanding the somewhat false report bestowed upon him by his so-called classicism, and we know his estimate of Shelley and of Byron, whilst Swinburne would have denounced him with equal vigour for his indifference on the one hand and his commendation on the other. These differences do not, of course, diminish the value of critical opinion, they merely point to the futility of attempting to find any common touchstone, and counsel a wise humility and tolerance. That Arnold and Swinburne demanded different things in poetry reflects to the discredit of neither. All men who care for the arts are pledged to refuse the false, the mean, and the vulgar at all seasons; but they do well to remain silent in the presence of things which they know to be none of these yet find themselves unable to love. Without this love criticism is ineffectual. Macaulay in writing of Montgomery merely antedated the ruin of a reputation by a decade or two; in writing of Milton he helped in the discipline of our understanding. Morris is for me among the supremely important poets, but I know that to some men to whose powers of perception I bow he is not of such vital significance. I do not dispute their conclusions; I can only endeavour to explain and justify my own.

Poetry seems to me to be the announcement of spiritual discovery. Experience might be substituted for discovery, for every experience which is vital and personal is, in effect, a discovery. The discovery need not be at all new to mankind; it is, indeed, inevitable that it will not be so. Nor need it be new to the poet himself. To every man spiritually alive the coming of spring is an experience recurrent yet always vital, always a discovery. Nearly every new poet writes well about the spring, just as every new poet writes well about love. So powerful is the creative impulse begotten by these experiences that it impels many men to attempt utterance without any adequate powers, and so the common gibes find their justification. But it is absurd to pronounce against the creative impulse itself whilst condemning the inefficient expression. The bad love poetry of the world is excluded from my definition not because it is unconcerned with discovery, but because it is not, in any full sense, an announcement. The articulation is not clear. And by reason of this defect a great deal of other writing which has behind it a perfectly genuine impulse is excluded also. On the other hand, much verse which has a good deal of perfection in form perishes, is, indeed, never alive, because its reason has been something other than spiritual discovery. But whenever these things are found together, the discovery and the announcement, then is poetry born, and at no other time. The magnitude of the poet's achievement depends on the range of his discovery and the completeness of his announcement. If I add that verse seems to me to be the only fitting form for poetry, I do so with full knowledge that weighty evidence and valuable opinion are against me. Nevertheless the term prose-poem seems to be an abomination. The poet in creation, that is to say the poet in the act of announcing spiritual discovery, will find his utterance assuming a rhythmical pattern. The pattern may be quite irregular and flowing, but unless it is discernible the impulse is incomplete in its effect. To think of the music of verse as merely an arbitrary adornment of expression is wholly to misunderstand its value. It is an integral part of expression in its highest manifestation. It is in itself expression. There is an exaltation at the moment of discovery which is apart from the discovery itself, a buoyancy as of flight. The significance of this exaltation is indefinable, having in it something of divinity. To the words of poetry it is given to announce the discovery; to the music to embody and in some inadequate measure translate the ecstasy which pervades the discovery. The poet's madness is happily not a myth; for to be mad is to be ecstatic.

A poet who in rather more than a generation had produced a small volume of exquisite work complained that a poet's greatness was too often measured by the bulk of his activity. Examination of the nature of the poet's function shows the complaint to be groundless. A man may indeed be immortal by virtue of a stanza if not of a single line. Edward Dyer's report could ill bear the loss of 'My mind to me a kingdom is.' And Martin Tupper passes with his interminable jingles safely into oblivion. But if a man is truly possessed of the poetic fire, we must accept as no negligible measure of his greatness not only the force with which it burns, but also the frequency. Dr. Johnson came nearer to the truth than is generally admitted when he said that the poet who had to wait for 'inspiration' was in a bad way. He was not altogether right, for in practice it is possible for the poet to lose his technical cunning for long periods, which really amounts to saying that there are times when the spiritual discovery is unaccompanied by the ecstatic exaltation. But he based his pronouncement on sound sense, as was his habit. What he meant was that a poet, before he could lay just claim to high rank, must so discipline himself to disentangle the significant from the insignificant in life as it presented itself to him day by day, that he should never be at a loss for something to say, that he should not have to wait for the event. Milton was not careless in his use of words, and when he said, 'I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrated of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem ... not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy,' he revealed the secret of the poet's necessity with perfect precision. The greater and more vital the poet, the less will he look upon his poetry as a casual incident of his life, the more will it become for him the impassioned and refined expression of his life in its entirety. Many men turn from the claims of their daily life to art as a recreation. This is far better than having no concern with art at all, but it is at best but a compromise. In reading a great poet we feel that here is a man to whom art and life are coincident, inseparable. In other words, that he is a man vitally curious about life in all its essential aspects, just as another man will be curious about market prices or electrical development; and just as they must by nature give daily expression to their curiosity about those relatively trivial things, so must he by nature strive to give daily expression to his curiosity about that supremely important thing. And as their constant preoccupation with those ephemeral matters will from time to time bear fruit in the shape of some weighty decision as to a course of action or the evolution of some new design and its application, so will his constant preoccupation with the permanent manifestations of life from time to time bear fruit as a creation of art—as a poem.

Throughout a life of phenomenal artistic energy, Morris never for a moment failed to realize this supreme requirement of the poet's being. He was pre-eminent in many activities, but it is upon his poetry that his reputation will ultimately depend, for in his poetry, inevitably, is found his clearest challenge to oblivion. Had he not written at all he would still have been a remarkable and memorable man, but having written much, and as poet, his claim as such must be considered before all others. And Morris's poetry is a permanent record of the man's temper, of his spiritual adventures and discoveries, not a desultory series of impressions imposed by external events, but the continuous manifestation of his reading of life. His conception of art, formed in his youth, as the expression of joy in living, as the immediate and necessary outcome of life itself wherever life was full, knew no change to the end. Art was this always to him, and it had no other value. Nothing made by man's hand or brain had any beauty in his eyes unless it expressed this intensity of life which went to its creation. The talk about art for art's sake would have been merely unintelligible to him, because the existence of art apart from life was inconceivable.

William Morris was born at Walthamstow on the 24th of March, 1834. The external record of his life has been given finally by Mr. J. W. Mackail in his Life, a book which, besides being a storehouse upon which all writers on Morris must draw and remain thankful debtors, is certainly one of the most beautiful biographies in the language. The wisdom of childhood is sometimes supposed to lie in the child's attitude of unquestioning acceptance, but the truth is that it lies in a constant sense of adventure. The wisdom of the poet is as the child's in this; for both wake daily in the hope and expectancy of new revelations. Unquestioning acceptance and the stifling of curiosity are the last infirmities of foolish minds. Life ceases to be lovely when it ceases to be adventurous. Morris in his boyhood was rich in a full measure of this wisdom of childhood, and by a fortunate circumstance his earliest days were spent in surroundings that gave ample opportunity for the development of his nature. If he owed his creativeness to nothing but his own endowment, the colour and atmosphere with which his work came to be suffused were largely influenced by the memory of days spent among the hornbeam thickets of the Essex woodlands and the meadows of Woodford, on the fringe of Epping Forest, the Morris family moving to Woodford Hall when the poet was six years old. By this time he was, we hear, already 'deep in the Waverley novels,' and in this connection we have the authority of one of his sisters for a circumstance that is curiously prophetic of a quality that was to mark his life-work. 'We never remember his learning regularly to read.' This instinctive acquisition of knowledge was not the least remarkable of Morris's faculties. He seemed always to understand the things he loved without taking thought. In the practical application of his knowledge no labour was too great; when he wanted to re-establish the art of dyeing, he spent weeks working at the vats in Leek; when he was directing the Kelmscott Press, whole pages would be rejected for a scarcely visible flaw; when he wished to furnish his house he found little enough in the market to satisfy his conscience, and so became a manufacturer; when he was drawn to the stories of the North he worked unweariedly with an Icelandic scholar and made two pilgrimages—no light undertakings in those days—to the home of his heroes. Miss May Morris in one of her admirable introductions to the complete edition of her father's works, tells us that he once said, 'No man can draw armour properly unless he can draw a knight with his feet on the hob, toasting a herring on the point of his sword.' It is easy to understand that he never learnt to read, for learning by any laborious process was foreign to his nature; knowledge of the things that were of importance to him was in some obscure way born in him. He would spare no pains to shape his knowledge into a serviceable instrument, but the knowledge itself was inherent in him. He moved among the men of the Sagas, of Greek mythology and the old romances, as intimately as we ordinarily move among the people of the house. Many of his friends give independent testimony to the fact that he never seems to have learnt deliberately of these men; his knowledge of them grew as his knowledge of speech and the ways about him. In considering his work in detail, the value of this instinctive familiarity will be apparent; it brings a sense of reality into his stories as could nothing else. We are hardly ever given laboured details of environment or appearance—merely a few casual strokes of suggestion that, by their very assurance and implication of knowledge, both on the part of the poet and of his reader, carry conviction. For this reason we never feel ourselves to be in strange surroundings or listening to strange men, and it is this privilege of close association with the world of the poet's fashioning that enables us to realize how accessible is that larger and clearer life of which he sings.

Throughout his life not only the beauty but the homeliness, the fellowship, of earth was a passion with him, and to the Woodford Hall days and the rambles over the downs and through Savernake, when a little later he was one of the earliest Marlborough boys, may be traced the beginnings of this strain in his temper. In a famous passage in his biography Mr. Mackail tells us how the boy, dressed in a suit of toy armour, used to ride through the park; how he and his brothers used to shoot red-wings and fieldfares in the winter holidays and roast them before a log fire we may be sure—for their supper; how he longed to shoot pigeons with a bow and arrow; how to the end of his life he carried with him recollections of stray sounds and sights and scents of those childhood days; how he would pore over the brasses and monuments that he discovered in the churches near to his home. It is doubtful whether anyone who has not spent some part of his early life in a countryside which has none of the striking beauties that make a landscape famous, that is, in the common phrase, uneventful, can quite realize the meaning of all this. In such surroundings a peculiar intimacy with the earth is born, a nearness to the change of season and the nature and moods of the country, which form a background of singular values in the whole of a man's later development. A man nurtured among the more majestic manifestations of natural beauty will, if he be a poet, in all probability translate his early impressions into single memorable passages, but the effect of environment such as that in which Morris's childhood was passed is of another kind. The whole of Morris's work is coloured and sweetened by a tenderness for earth which, while it does not fail to find at times direct expression of exquisite loveliness, is nevertheless a pervasive mood rather than a series of isolated impressions. It is this circumstance that came to give quite common words an unusual significance in his poetry. When he speaks of 'the half-ploughed field' or 'the blossomed fruit trees' or 'the quivering noontide haze' or 'the brown bird's tune' or 'the heavy-uddered cows,' or simply 'the meadows green,' the whole of his passionate earth-worship is thrown up with clear-cut intensity and his utterance takes on a value which is wholly unexplained by the mere words of his choice.

At Marlborough the poet's independence of character was already shown. The school-games had no attraction for him. Birds'-nesting, excursions to outlying churches and ruins, explorations of any early remains of which he could discover the whereabouts, long walks accompanied by the improvisation of endless stories of knightly adventure, the reading of any books of romance, archæology and architecture that came to his hand—these were his chief occupations. Before he left the school, his father died, and the family again moved, this time to Water House at Walthamstow. Here again the boy found full store upon which to indulge his imaginative bent. A broad moat, a great paved hall, a wooded island, wide marshlands, all fitted well with the tendencies that had already asserted themselves. When he left Marlborough at the age of seventeen, there was nothing to show that he was to become a great creative artist, but there was everything to show the atmosphere in which his work would be conceived in such an event. After reading with a private tutor for a year, Morris went up to Oxford at the beginning of the Lent term in 1853.

Tennyson had established his reputation with the issue of the two volumes of "Poems" in 1842. Since then he had published "The Princess" in 1847, and "In Memoriam" in 1850, and was already generally acknowledged as a great new voice in poetry. Browning with "Pauline" in 1833, "Paracelsus" in 1835, "Strafford" in 1837, and the series of plays that followed, had proved his authenticity, but had not yet gained the general recognition that was to be brought a little nearer by the "Dramatic Lyrics" and "Dramatic Romances" of 1842 and 1845, and "Christmas Eve and Easter Day" in 1850. "Men and Women" was not yet published. Clough and Arnold had lately printed their first books, and seven years were to pass before Swinburne's name was to appear on a title-page. Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel" had been printed in the Pre-Raphaelite magazine, "The Germ," but save for a few contributions to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine his poetry was to wait until 1870 before being given to the public. In prose the influence of the teachings of Carlyle and Ruskin was dominating criticism and æsthetic thought throughout the country, whilst the religious unrest and scientific revaluation, that were to leave their witness to posterity in the work of men so far removed from each other in temper as Newman and Darwin, and Arnold and Clough, were forcing a full share of men's attention to the consideration of abstract ideas.

To determine the exact measure of the influence that the varied expressions of an age's intellectual process exercises upon any single mind belonging to that age is difficult to the point of impossibility. Maeterlinck, in saying that the soul of the peasant would not be what it is to-day had Plato or Plotinus, of whom he has never heard, not lived, endorses the precise truth that Shelley uttered when he said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. The influence of one mind on another is one of the subtlest questions of psychology, and the attempt to trace with any precision the responsiveness of creative genius at all points to the mental movement about it is vain. It would be rash to say that the author of "The Origin of Species" had no influence on the author of The Earthly Paradise, as it certainly would be impossible to define what that influence was. Darwin and the Tractarians, the puzzled questionings of the sceptics and the conflicting voices of assertion and confutation, no doubt meant little enough as such to Morris when he went up to Oxford. But they were none the less manifestations of the age that shaped his power of expression, and in a negative and indirect way at least they had a share in his development. The limits of the influence of any commanding creative or speculative mind cannot be laid down. The most romantic poet writing to-day would be witless to assert that he was wholly uninfluenced by, say, Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Balfour, for, whether he realizes the fact or not, these men form part of the intellectual atmosphere in which he is writing. It is a common charge against Morris that he alienated himself, as a poet, from the questions that were troubling his time, as though the poet's theme should undergo continual change with the generations. All experience is emphatic in its assertion of the folly of this attitude. Nothing is more dangerous to the poet than to be in too close contact with the immediate questions of the moment, for, broadly considered, the things of immediate importance are the unimportant things. Much of our finest creative energy to-day is being exhausted in the consideration of problems that are local and temporary, not fulfilling its creative function with proper completeness, being, rather, bravely destructive, an office honourable enough but not that of the poet's supreme distinction. Morris, from the moment of his earliest artistic consciousness, was perfectly clear as to this matter. He was not at any time deaf to the clamour that came from all sides, nor was he indifferent to it. But he found it partly incomprehensible, partly unlovely, and partly negative, and he turned away from it, not as in retreat from a thing that he feared, but in the search for the life which it was unable to offer. The challenge and counter-challenge of the prophets of the millennium and confusion worse confounded, the disputations of the two-and-seventy jarring sects were not outside the range of Morris's consciousness, but he was content at first to leave them to their own issues. The socialism that was to enter so largely into his later life was not the result of a sudden access of new feeling, but a further expression, in perfectly logical development, of the mental and spiritual outlook that was substantially unchanged from the first. The new expression, when it forced itself upon him, was, indeed, not unconnected with a negative and destructive programme, but it was in reality no more than an attempt to realize the world that he had created in his art, the world that contained for him the only possible life consistent with free beauty and joy. But, with whatever energy he threw himself into the new work when it came, he never for a moment allowed it to shake his artistic creed.

Nothing is further from the truth than the common assertion that Morris in his art turned from a life of realities to a dream-world, if by a dream-world is meant, and I can apply no other meaning, a world intangible, unrealizable, and remote from practical considerations. We have seen that the earth was to Morris from boyhood in some sort a sacred thing. And the people of the earth were no less. His one overmastering passion was for a world wherein men and women lived in full responsiveness to the beauty of the earth, labouring with their hands and adventurous and capricious in spirit, finding joy in their work and in contact with each other, and rejecting all the things of civilization that were dulling and mechanical. To object that in a commercial civilization so superficially complex—the complexity is really a thing without the subtlety of humanity in it, relatively fixed and reducible to exact formulæ—this passion was in effect no more than a rather futile dream, might be reasonable if Morris himself had not wholly answered the objection in his work. He found people not only indifferent to the loveliness of earth, but destroying it on every hand; not only forgetting the joy of labour, but debasing it into a daily burden; measuring the value of all work not by the meaning of the work and the spiritual satisfaction that it brought but by the wage that it earned, and fettered in all their relations to each other by countless considerations imposed by external conditions that were not essential factors in humanity, but the whims of a social scheme that mastered men instead of being their servant. From the first he realized that out of such a life no supreme art could spring; the material that they offered was ugly and devitalized, and art can only accept for its service material beautiful and strong. The world as he found it was fettered and numbed, and he sought in his art to create a world free and exultant, one peopled by perfectly normal people whose sorrows were the sorrows of common experience and whose sins were the expression merely of the darker, but not diseased, passions of humanity. When active socialism became part of his work, his sole purpose was, in his own words, to make socialists, which meant, for Morris, to bring men to a sense of the possibility of the life of large simplicity that he had created as poet. His practice and experiments in handicraft and manufacturing process were all experiments of the same spirit; throughout his many-sided activities an extraordinary unity of intention can be clearly traced. Morris at the loom, or decorating a page, or riding his pony through the Icelandic fords, or proving colours in the vats, or moving among the haymakers in the Kelmscott meadows, was but one of the men with whom he peopled his stories. He wanted all men to attain to this same joyous energy, and the fierce denunciations and charges of his socialistic days were no more than another expression of this desire.

At Oxford the good beginnings of Woodford Hall and Savernake were given every opportunity to develop. He found himself associated with men whose ideals and enthusiasms were as his own. He went into residence in the same term as Edward Burne-Jones, and quickly laid the foundations of a lifelong friendship of more than common loyalty. It is usual to speak regretfully of the growth of modern Oxford. The mediæval town has, indeed, surrounded itself with reaches of quite unlovely slums and suburbs giving just reason for the regret. But, as was said in reply to one who was deploring the vulgarities which have been carried into modern Venice, 'Exactly, but what else in the world is there like it?' Oxford has suffered a change, but in Oxford there are yet survivals scarcely to be found elsewhere in England. The quadrangles, the bye-streets that curl between the colleges and churches, the succession of spires and grey walls, still preserve unbroken a tradition that goes back to the days when men lived, or so Morris believed, as the men of whom he sang. And in 1853 the tradition, if not clearer, was less threatened by opposing interests than it is to-day. With the scholastic discipline, or lack of it, at Oxford in his time Morris had little or no concern, but he could have found no place more fitting in which to shape his imaginative powers. With Burne-Jones and others of his friends he spent many priceless hours determining all things in heaven and earth with the fine certainty of youth, reading mediæval chronicles and Thorpe's "Northern Mythology," exploring the enchanted worlds of the poets and stirred to new enthusiasms by the latest word of Ruskin or the newly-discovered revelation of some prophet of an older day. Architecture had already taken its place in his mind as one of the noblest of the expressions of man's exultation in his work, and the intention which he had at this time of entering the church was manifestly inspired rather by ecclesiastical art than by any doctrine or dogma. The long vacations of 1853 and 1854 he spent in visiting the churches of England and Northern France, and in making his first acquaintance with the work of Van Eyck and Memling and Dürer. In painting, as in the other arts, he looked already for the grave yet vigorous simplicity, and that sense of the profound seriousness of joy that were to be the essential characteristics of his own work. His love for mediævalism was neither accident nor the fruit of any refusal to face his own age. It was the logical outcome of this intense conviction that most of the men about him were exhausting their energies and deadening their faculties in the conduct of trivial and inessential things. In the records of the mediæval spirit, in its art, he found the temper which more clearly than any other was at once a warning and a corrective to this wastage. A year spent at Oxford in the company of men who shared his enthusiasms had sharpened his imagination and quickened his creative instinct. He was now ready for Malory and Chaucer and the revelation of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites. With a perfectly defined ideal already developed in his consciousness, he was beginning to write. It only needed contact with these new influences to make his utterance certain and invest the ideal with artistic expression.

When in 1855 he came of age, Morris found himself the possessor of an annual income of £900, the result of a fortunate business transaction made by his father a short time before he died. Burne-Jones had already announced, in a letter to a friend, his intention of forming a 'Brotherhood,' the purpose of which, shared by Morris among others, was, of course, nothing less than the regeneration of mankind. Sir Galahad was to be the patron of the order, the nature of which was to be a strange blending of social activity and monastic seclusion. The scheme in detail—if it ever reached so advanced a stage—passed into the splendid story of youthful enthusiasms, but its principal projectors never wavered in their loyalty to its spirit. To a man so fired, the possession of £900 a year was a responsibility not to be lightly considered. It left him free to choose his course, and it was an integral part of his faith that that course should be laid wholly in the service of his ideal. For a time his choice was uncertain; his original intention of entering the church led to a momentary idea of founding a monastery with his money. But the gradually widening influence of the adventurousness of art that was working in him made him less and less willing to commit himself to any irrevocable step. He was beginning to realize his powers; his friends, who were no dishonest critics, confirmed his own feeling that his earliest poems were signs of a remarkable creative faculty. But he was not yet certain as to the ways into which his art would lead him. Painting and architecture divided his allegiance with literature, and behind his consideration of all was the vague but unalterable determination to use his art in the service of mankind. His decision was wisely deferred until it should force itself upon him.

The first practical step taken by the Brotherhood—the friends retained the original name whilst renouncing all their monastic intentions—was the foundation of "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine." Chaucer had been discovered, and the group's somewhat austere asceticism had been sweetened by the charity of the poet to whom Morris was henceforth never to fail in discipleship. A copy of the Pre-Raphaelite "Germ" had also established Rossetti in the friends' worship, and they had seen some of his paintings, together with those of Millais and Holman Hunt and Madox Brown. In all these things Morris found the conception of life that he had already made his own, in beautiful and more or less complete expression. Twelve numbers of the magazine appeared, financed by Morris. Its aim was the expression of the Brotherhood's artistic creed and its loyalty to the essential idea of the identity of art with life. Rossetti was among its contributors. Of Morris's own work in the venture, his earliest poems and prose romances, something will be said in the next chapter.

Before leaving Oxford Morris and Burne-Jones together definitely abandoned their idea of entering the church. The latter decided on the work to which his life was to be devoted, whilst Morris formally adopted architecture as a profession. Arrangements were made for him to enter G. E. Street's Oxford office, and after a second visit to France and its churches and passing his Final schools, he took up his new work at the beginning of 1856. In his spare time he continued his writing and tried his hand at craftsmanship. Burne-Jones went up to London a few months later. Morris followed shortly when Street moved his headquarters. Together they formed a close acquaintance with Rossetti. That dominating personality was not slow to recognize the powers of his new friends, and insisted that Morris should turn painter, asserting, with an inconsequence worthy of one of Oscar Wilde's creations, that everybody should be a painter. His proposal, although it had no permanent effect on Morris, showed that the election of architecture was not unalterable. For a time Morris painted, throwing into the work the energy that was inseparable from all his undertakings, but he was quick to realize that with all his understanding of the painter's art he could not achieve its mastery. The fact that he had been tempted to alter his choice even tentatively, however, was enough to make him suspicious of the choice itself. Without any conviction as to the possibility of a career as a painter, he abandoned his profession as architect at the end of a year. His state was one of considerable danger. Rich enough to make work unnecessary as a means of living, exposed to an influence so impetuous as Rossetti's, already showing considerable power in several forms of expression as an artist, wholly unable to dissociate one from the other, seeing but one purpose behind them all, there was a probability, in the light of experience almost a certainty, that he would become an excellent amateur of the arts, practising many things with credit and triumphant in none, a generous patron, a kind of titanic dilettante. The manner in which he overcame this danger is one of the most remarkable things in the history of art. Had some circumstance, external or internal, forced him to concentrate himself on one or another of the forms with which he was experimenting, the escape would have been normal and relatively free of difficulty. But there was no such circumstance. His activities daily became more diffused rather than more concentrated. Carving, modelling, illuminating, designing, painting, poetry and prose-writing, all became part of his daily scheme. Painting, indeed, he left, save for incidental purposes, but the scope of his practice widened with every year. And instead of becoming, as would seem to have been inevitable, an accomplished amateur, he became a master in everything he touched. He revolutionized many manufacturing processes and invested craftsmanship with a vitality that it had not known for centuries; he rediscovered secrets of mediæval artistry that were supposed to be finally lost, and re-established the union between beauty and things of common use; he became printer, and the books from his press are scarcely excelled in the history of printing; he wrote prose romances which in themselves would have secured him an honourable place in literature, and yet all these achievements might be cancelled and he would still stand as one of the greatest poets of his age; or, indeed, of any age. It is all an astonishing testimony to the vitality of his artistic conscience. However uncertain might be the expression of his art in these early days, the fundamental significance of art was rooted in his being with an unassailable strength. In the light of his life-work these first more or less indefinite gropings appear no longer as the whims of a nature uncertain of itself. The impulse within him was not to be satisfied by any partial expression. If it was to create a new world in poetry, it must also strive to bring that world in some measure into the affairs of daily life. It was not sufficient for Morris that the dishes and goblets on the king's table in his song should be beautiful or that he should commemorate Jason in halls hung 'with richest webs.' The furnishings of his own table must be comely too, and the 'richest webs' should not be a memory alone. No more perfect example of critical stupidity could well be found than the notion that Morris, as a creative artist, separated himself from the affairs of the life about him, as if in retreat. Every line of poetry that he wrote was the direct expression of the spirit in which he ordered his daily practice.

Morris's feeling for mediævalism must not be misunderstood. He was fully conscious of the fact that a few centuries are as but a moment in the development of man, and he did not turn to early art as to the expression of a humanity differing in any fundamental way from the humanity of his own day. Nor did he turn to that aspect of mediævalism which has given it the name of the Dark Ages, but to the life that produced Giotto and Angelico, Van Eyck and Dürer, and Holbein and Memling, the monks whose illuminated books he prized so dearly, and Chaucer.[1] He was not indifferent to the masterpieces of the modern world. The range of Shakespeare's humanity, Shelley's spiritual ardour, the passionate identification of truth with beauty which was as a gospel to Keats, the earlier poems of Tennyson and Browning, he accepted as revelations. Wordsworth and Milton he professed to dislike, but he more probably disliked the people who liked them wrongly. Nothing is more provocative than the praise of fools. But it was in the work of those early artists, the men from whom the Pre-Raphaelites took their name, that he found the most perfect and satisfying expression of the spiritual life which was for him the only true salvation on earth. It has been said by Paul Lacroix that in the painting of Jan Van Eyck 'the Gothic school decked itself with a splendour which left but little for the future Venetian school to achieve beyond; with one flight of genius, stiff and methodical conceptions became imbued with suppleness and vital action.' The same is substantially true of Chaucer in poetry. Some lessons in rudimentary technique might have been learned by these men from their predecessors, but their powers of expression were vibrant as some newly-discovered energy, and they used them in all their freshness to embody a sane, simple view of life such as Morris himself held. The subtlety which might follow in the evolution from these beginnings, the greater intricacy of achievement, would take their place in his consciousness, but nothing could ever displace his worship of these frank and exultant records of man's joy in his work, a joy that he hoped would yet be regained. They and their kind remained for him, throughout his life, the supreme examples of the meaning of art.

When he gave up his work in Street's office, Morris moved with Burne-Jones to rooms in Red Lion Square. They were unfurnished, and out of this circumstance really sprang the beginnings of 'Morris and Company,' although the firm was not actually founded until 1861. The two artists found nothing in the shops that was tolerable, so Morris made rough designs of furniture and commissioned a carpenter to execute them in plain deal. Chairs, a massive table, a settle and a wardrobe were among the first acquisitions. Rossetti painted two panels of the settle, and Burne-Jones decorated the wardrobe with paintings from Chaucer. When Morris built his own house this process was carried out on a larger scale, but the beginnings of the revolution of house-furnishing in England are clearly traceable to the rooms in Red Lion Square.

In the Long Vacation of 1875 Rossetti conceived the ill-fated scheme of mural paintings for the new hall of the Oxford Union. The story need not be told here in any detail. Morris and Burne-Jones were pressed unto the service with some six or seven others, and each painted one picture, Morris in addition designing and carrying out the decoration of the ceiling. No proper preparations were made for the work, and the paintings have perished. The undertaking is interesting to us here as throwing sidelights on certain aspects of Morris's temperament. He had begun and finished his picture long before any of the others, and while they were still engaged on their appointed shares he had voluntarily set himself to the ceiling design. His capacity for work, of which this is the first striking example, was always enormous, and it is not surprising to hear that a distinguished doctor, speaking of his comparatively early death at the age of sixty-three, said, 'I consider the case is this: the disease is simply being William Morris and having done more work than most ten men.' It was on this occasion, too, that his strange store of assimilated knowledge was put to practical use. The paintings were all taken from the "Mort d'Arthur," and models were required for arms and armour. They were not to be found, and Morris, unaided by books of reference, designed them, and they were made by a jobbing smith under his supervision. When the Union work was finished he took rooms in Oxford instead of returning to London, and among the new friends that he made was Swinburne, then an undergraduate at Balliol. He continued his apprenticeship as a painter with enthusiasm but lessening conviction, but poetry was already becoming a first consideration with him. He had already published a few poems, as we have seen, in the "Oxford and Cambridge Magazine," and several others were written during his temporary residence in Oxford.

He was a man of fine physique and a remarkable vehemence of temper. Burne-Jones tells us that when they were painting the Union walls and needed models they sat for each other, and that Morris 'had a head always fit for Lancelot or Tristram.' To think a thing was generally to say it. His intolerance of everything vulgar and mean and disloyal in art and life found immediate and forceful expression. A friend who knew him well tells me of an occasion when he went with Burne-Jones to the theatre. They were sitting in the pit, and one of the actresses was incurring Morris's particular displeasure by reason of her misuse of her mother-tongue. At a moment of tension she had to enter and announce that her father was dead. She did so, but to the effect that her 'father was dad.' Morris could bear it no longer, and standing up with his hands clenched he roared across the theatre, 'What the devil do you mean by dad?' to the utter discomfiture of his companion. Insincerity—and incompetence he took to be a form of insincerity—at all times exhausted his patience, and he was never careful to conceal his feelings.

The time of preparation was now passing into the time of achievement. Morris's nature had been spared much of the shock and stress to which it might have been subjected in its growth by the vulgarity and violent uncertainty of his age, by the fortunate contact with men who were in revolt. The movement that they represented and of which he was a part was large and strong enough to make a positive and progressive life of its own instead of being merely an isolated expression of turbulent disagreement. It was one of those rare manifestations, a revolt the first purpose of which was not to destroy but to create. To this influence had been added that of a countryside gravely beautiful, one full of the shadows and colour of romance, or, more precisely, of the northern romance to which he was always to lend his most faithful service. It must not be supposed that this implies any coldness in his nature, which was at all times finely passionate. But it was, always, also simple, and simplicity of passion is the ultimate distinction of the North. The luxuriance of the South, with all its beauty, tends to obscurity. Nothing is further from wisdom than to suppose that the passion of the North is cold; it is merely naked. His characteristic simplicity of outlook was not yet impressing itself with its final certainty on his work, but it was already in being, as is clear from the records of his personality as it appeared to his friends at the beginning of his career.

Such was the nature of the man, who, fostered to articulate expression in a spiritual atmosphere which it has been my purpose to describe, was about to make his first appeal as poet to the public. Early in 1858, Messrs. Bell and Daldy published The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems.

II EARLY POEMS AND PROSE

In insisting upon the simplicity of Morris's artistic ideal it is well to examine a little closely the precise meaning of simplicity. Spiritual adventure is the supremely momentous thing in a man's life, but it is also the most intangible. Art being the most perfect expression of spiritual adventure, its function is to impart to the recipient some measure of that exaltation experienced by its creator at the moment of conception. But to attain this end the art must have that instinctive rightness which cannot be achieved by taking thought but only by a rarity of perception which lends essential truth to the common phrase that the artist is born, not made. If you give a potter a lump of clay he may shape it into a vessel ugly or beautiful. If our artistic intelligence or our spiritual intelligence is awake, we shall instantly determine the result; if ugly it will revolt us, or at best leave us indifferent; if beautiful it will give us joy. But the difference, which is evident enough to our consciousness, does not enable us to define the distinction between the ugly and the beautiful, the dead and the quick. We only know that in the one there is an obscure and wonderful vitality and satisfying completeness that is lacking in the other. The beautiful thing may be perfectly simple, but it nevertheless has in it something strange and indefinable, something as elusive as life itself. The simple must not be confused with the easy. When Morris read his first poem to the acclamation of his friends, and announced that if this was poetry it was very easy to write, it must be remembered that he meant that it was easy for the rare creative organisation that was William Morris. No doubt it was just as easy for Shelley in the moment of creation to set down an image of desolation as perfect as

as it is for the veriest poetaster to produce his commonplaces, and the result is certainly as simple, but the one is touched into life by the god-like thing which we call imagination, whilst the other is nerveless. The bow that was as iron to the suitors bent as a willow wand to the hand of Ulysses. The simplicity of Morris's art is yet compact of the profound and inscrutable mystery. It is not wholly true to say that all great or good art is simple. From Donne to Browning and Meredith there have been poets whose art is complex and yet memorable. It is not my present purpose to discuss the precise value of simplicity in art, but to point out that simplicity does not imply either superficiality or the worthless kind of ease.

Richard Watson Dixon said that in his opinion Morris never excelled his early poems in achievement, and his judgment in the matter has been echoed a good many times with far less excuse than Dixon himself could plead. To him they represented the first impassioned expression of a life which he had shared, and enthusiasms which he had helped to kindle, and by which in turn he had been fostered. He was the man to whom Morris first read his first poem, and there was naturally a fragrance in the memory which nothing could ever quite replace. But the echoes have no such justification, and are generally the result of incomplete knowledge. The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems is quite good enough to make it safe to avow a preference for it, without reading the later work. A reputation for taste may be preserved here, with the least possible labour. But there is nothing in the volume which helps to make the position really tenable. There is, indeed, scarcely any poet who can point to a first volume of such high excellence, so completely individual, so certain in intention, as could Morris. But to set it above the freedom and poignancy of The Life and Death of Jason, the tenderness and architectural strength of The Earthly Paradise and the fiery triumph of Sigurd the Volsung is a critical absurdity. It is a remarkable book, one which in itself would have assured Morris of his place in the history of poetry, but it remains no more than the exquisite prelude of a man whose complete achievement in poetry was to stand with the noblest of the modern world.

The chief evidence of immaturity which is found in Morris's first book is a certain vagueness of outline in some of the poems. The wealth of decorative colour of which he was never to be dispossessed is already here, and on the whole it is used fitly and with restraint. Effects such as

and

and

And again,

and whole passages in such poems as The Wind, and even poems in their entirety such as The Gilliflower of Gold depend as much upon their colour as if actually done with a brush; and they depend safely, whilst the use of one art by another can scarcely be more triumphantly vindicated than by the lines in A Good Knight in Prison, where Sir Guy says:—

There are moments, however, in this volume when the poet's power of visualizing, as with the eyes of the painter, lead him into a weakness from which his later work is entirely free. When Guenevere says:—

we feel that a certain sacrifice of emotional directness of speech is being made to a sense that intrudes on the poetry without intensifying it. And we have the same feeling when Galahad says:—

The elaboration in these places blurs rather than quickens our vision, as it does again in Rapunzel's song:—

We may almost forgive a young poet flaws which are in themselves lovely and are but excesses of a method which he commonly uses to wholly admirable ends; but they are flaws none the less. The sense of values is not yet consistently true. But the indistinctness of outline of which I have spoken is a more serious weakness than this occasional indiscretion in the use of colour.

The poems in the volume may, somewhat arbitrarily, but fitly for the present purpose, be considered as four or five groups. The poems in the first, headed by The Defence of Guenevere, King Arthur's Tomb and Sir Galahad, have love for their central theme and aim at conducting a more or less simple love story to its successful or disastrous issue with directness and clarity. The obscurity that alone threatens their complete success is not due to subtlety on the one hand nor to vagueness of conception on the other, but merely to a power of expression that was not yet sure of itself. Psychological subtlety was not, as is sometimes supposed, outside Morris's range; on the contrary, he gives constant and varied evidence of a depth of perception in human affairs quite remarkable, as will be shown. But the subtlety was never confused and blurred by the sophistry that tempts so many poets on making a really pregnant psychological discovery into all kinds of unintelligible elaboration. When he saw clearly into the workings of the mind he recorded his vision in a few sharp and clearly defined strokes, and left it. Subtlety and obscurity are never synonymous in his work. And although, at twenty-four, his understanding of man's love for woman was naturally not very profound or wide in its range, it was passionate and quite sure of itself within its own imaginative experience. His failure in places to give his understanding clear utterance is the failure of a man not yet wholly used to his medium. When Guenevere says:—

the thought is neither close nor difficult, nor, on the other hand, is it loose, but the statement is not lucid. It is, however, intelligible after we have sifted it a little carefully, but in such a passage as—

the thought is hidden in an utterance so tangled and involved as to make it almost impossible to straighten it out, and in any case poetry so enigmatic ceases to be poetry at all. Such extreme instances are, however, very rare even in this first volume, and scarcely ever to be found in his later work. The title-poem throughout is uncertain in its expression. There are passages of fine directness and precision as—

and the picture of Guenevere at the close, listening for Launcelot, 'turn'd sideways,'

but in spite of these and the unquestionable beauty of the poem's cumulative effect, there is a troubling lack of firmness in many places that makes the achievement incomplete. I think that the use of terza rima in itself has something to do with this. In a poem like Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" we are prepared to follow the poet in any imaginative flight that he may attempt from moment to moment, and his adventurousness finds all the time some turn of thought that will perfectly fit the exacting demands of the form that he is using. But in Morris's poem the process of the narrative to be convincing can only be conducted in one way, and that way the poet frequently finds obstructed by the necessity of a verse-form particularly difficult in English. However this may be, King Arthur's Tomb is certainly less open to this charge of obscurity in utterance, and the thought has more imaginative force in it. There are passages here that suggest the presence of a poet to whom the highest things in poetry may yet be possible. Guenevere's cry—

has a poignancy and a curious understanding of the action of a mind in spiritual anguish that were to be so nobly employed in things like the close of Jason. The dramatic opposition of Guenevere's love, which is all the while troubled by the half-consciousness of sin, to Launcelot's, which is its own sole cause and justification, is, further, a first indication of the poet's power to set the elemental passions in action at once simple and convincing. When the Queen finds her lover lying on the dead king's tomb, she schools her tongue to a cold absurdity, not daring to trust herself,—'Well done! to pray for Arthur,' and Launcelot cries out:—

and the queen's answer falls with the tragic intensity of spiritual self-betrayal—

There is in this, and in the whole of the poem from this point a true and incisive sense of conflict, continually heightened by such perfectly balanced turns of the imagination as when Launcelot says:—

culminating in the confused feelings of terror and appeased destiny at the end of Guenevere's speaking.

Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery is, it may be said, entirely free of the obscurity, and shows, if not a profounder, yet a more acute power of perception. The beauty and tenderness of love-sorrow are themes common enough in poetry, but Morris by making Galahad's experience of them spring from his thought of other men's love presents them with a peculiarly fresh poignancy. Galahad on his quest, 'dismal, unfriended,' thinks of the other knights.

And Launcelot can think of Guenevere, 'next month I kiss you, or next week, And still you think of me,' but Galahad himself

and people will but say that he 'If he had lived, had been a right good knight' and that very evening will be glad when 'in their scarlet sleeves the gay-dress'd minstrels sing.' The force of the poet's thought about a particular phase of love is intensified in an unmistakable way by placing the utterance on the lips of a man who is not speaking of his own experience, which would have been beautiful but a little sentimental, but of his hunger for the experience, sorrowful though it may be, which is emotionally tragic. And we find another stroke of memorable subtlety when the voice of the vision says to the knight, speaking of Launcelot's love for Guenevere:—

The thought here, with wonderful instinct on the part of the poet, is precisely Galahad's own. It shapes the compensation to his spirit for its hunger and loneliness. We feel, in passages such as these, that here is a poet exultant in the exercise of a rare faculty of statement. The spiritual discovery and the announcement are in perfect correspondence. A Good Knight in Prison, Old Love, The Sailing of the Sword and Welland River are the other poems that may be included in this first group. They attempt a smaller psychological range than the poems already considered, but they have the same emotional intention and achieve it with clarity and precision. These poems already show the pervasive passion for the earth that has been discussed; the landscape is everywhere informed by intimacy and tenderness. Another aspect of the poet's temper too finds expression—an extraordinarily vivid sense of natural change and death. With speculation as to the unknown Morris was never concerned in his poetry. Death was to him neither a fearful thing nor yet a deliverance or a promise. It was simply the severing of a beautiful thing that he loved—life; the end of a journey that no labours could make wearisome. He did not question it, nor did he seek to evade its reality, but the thought of it was always coloured with a profound if perfectly brave melancholy. Without ever disputing with his reason the possibility of death's beneficence, it was not the beneficence of death that he perceived emotionally, but the pity of it. It was a fading away, and as such it filled him with a regretful tenderness, just as did the fading of the full year. The close of The Ode to the West Wind crystallizes a mental attitude of which Morris was temperamentally incapable. But it is, of course, a mistake to suppose that the beauty of his poetry suffers in consequence. It is not the nature of the mood that matters, but its personal intensity.

The poems of the second group, of which The Chapel in Lyoness is the most notable example, have a central point in common with those of the first, but there is a mysticism in them which is quite unrelated to the obscurity which has been examined. It is not a mysticism that has any definite scheme or purpose underlying it; indeed I am not sure that mysteriousness would not be a fitter word to use. It is just the mysteriousness of artistic youth, proud of the faculty of which it finds itself possessed and a little prodigal in its use. There is still the effort to keep the lines of the story clear, but they are deliberately the lines of a soft brush rather than a steel point. To read The Chapel in Lyoness, Concerning Geffray Teste Noire and The Judgment of God is to receive an impression which is clear enough as long as we refrain from seeking to define it too precisely. The central thought and incidents of these poems are set out perfectly plainly, but there is superimposed a mysticism to which, happily, there is no key. We may never be quite sure of its meaning, but we know at least that it does not mean something which would be clear if once we divined some elusive secret of its nature. It is like the soft scent of an orchard, and we accept it as gratefully and with as little question.

In poems such as Rapunzel and The Wind, however, the quality that in those other poems was but an incident is adopted as a definite manner. What was before merely atmosphere is here employed as the substance. These two poems scarcely make any direct statement at all, and yet they succeed in an extraordinary way in conveying a precise intellectual impression. Through a wealth of imagery and verbal colour run thin threads of suggestion that, fragile as they are, yet stand out as clearly as the veins in dark marble and have the same values. It is remarkable that the coloured clouds in which these poems are, as it were, wrapped, are never stifling. The flowers of Morris's poetry are never of the hot-house. At the moments when he is most freely putting language to decorative use, he preserves a freshness as of windy moorlands or the green stalks of lilies. At times the threads of suggestion disappear altogether, and in the third group we find poems which are frankly essays in colour without any attempt at concrete significance. The Tune of Seven Towers, Two Red Roses Across the Moon, The Blue Closet, are examples. It is wrong to say that these poems have no meaning. They mean exactly the colours that they themselves create. It would be as wise to say that a sunset or a blue distance of mountains is meaningless. Somewhere between poems like The Wind and The Tune of Seven Towers may be placed The Gilliflower of Gold, Spell Bound, Golden Wings, and two or three others.

The volume, if it were to be measured by the poems already mentioned, would have the first great quality of being unforgettable. A note is struck which is not necessarily beyond the compass but certainly outside the temperament of anyone but Morris. There is at present no trace of the discipleship to Chaucer, but a suggestion here and there of kinship with the Coleridge of "Kubla Khan" and the Keats of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." The method of the later poems is already clearly suggested, but the feeling and expression are marked by the natural limitations and splendid excesses of youth. Morris places his figures on a background which is not unrelated to life but unrelated to the inessential circumstances of life. Through a changing year of daffodil tufts and roses, cornfields and autumn woods and the frozen twigs of winter, passes a pageant of knights in armour of silver and blue steel, with bright devices on their tabards and shields strewn with stars or flashing back gold to the sunlight, and queens and ladies passionate and beautiful. But they move on an earth that is the real earth of Morris's own experience; he has a definite meaning when he says

and the enchantment of his forests is that of the hornbeam twilight of his Essex homeland. And they themselves are people of flesh and blood, stirred by the common emotions of humanity. The passion, the glamour, and the poignancy of love and life all find mature expression in these pages, but we have to wait until Jason and The Earthly Paradise for the presence of the innate nobility of love and life behind these things. There is at present none of the fine austerity that is a quality essential to the highest poetry, but that is but to say that Morris in his youth was writing as a young man should and must write. The growth of the prophet in the poet is not to be looked for in the first fervour of song. The most that we can ask justly at this season is witness to the presence of the poet, and this we have here in abundance.

The most memorable achievement of the volume is, however, Sir Peter Harpdon's End, which stands by itself, or, perhaps, with one other poem, The Haystack in the Floods. The historian of English drama during the second half of the nineteenth century might, if he were unwary, omit William Morris from his reckonings. If he were astute enough to remember him it would probably be as the author of Love is Enough. And yet at a time when some curious spell seems to have fallen on the poets whenever they turned their thoughts to the stage, Sir Peter Harpdon's End reminds us of one, at least, to whom the union of drama and poetry was not impossible. Morris himself would seem to have been unconscious of the fact, for not only was he careless in this instance when a little care would have made his success strikingly complete, but henceforth he neglected this side of his faculty, exercising it on but one other occasion, and then in a more or less experimental mood, of which something will be said later. It will be well to examine this short play in detail, for its importance is apt to be under-estimated. In writing it Morris realized, as did no poet of his time and scarcely any poet since the close of the great epoch of poetic drama in England, the exact value of action in drama. The complete subordination of character and idea to action is a brief epitome of that degeneration of the modern theatre from which we are now witnessing the dawn of a deliverance. The supreme, though not necessarily the only, function of the drama is to show the development of character and the progress of idea through the medium of action, and until to-day the stage has been surrendered for a century, if not for a longer period, to work that is wholly unconcerned with this condition. The event has been everything. The poets from Shelley to Swinburne have realized this error and revolted, but in their eagerness to correct an abuse that was threatening the highest manifestation of their art, they have with amazing regularity overlooked another condition which, if not of equal importance, cannot be disregarded without lamentable results. Determined to dispossess action of its usurped authority, they have neglected its lawful and indispensable service. Their opponents in asserting action at the cost of all other things, and having, in consequence, nothing to say beyond the bare statement of events, have failed to produce either good literature or good drama, whilst they themselves, in turning to ideas alone, have had much to say and have so produced good and often noble literature, but in neglecting to preserve the right balance between ideas and action they too have failed to produce good drama. They have, unfortunately, no just answer to the charge that they constantly allow the play of character and idea to be unrelated to the action which they have chosen as their framework. Their failure in dramatic result, though free of the deplorable poverty and baseness of the method against which they were a reaction, is no less complete. Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, all wrote fine dramatic poetry, but they cannot show between them a poetic play that achieves with any precision the fundamental purpose of drama.

Morris's instinct in this matter was perfectly poised. The mechanical part of the technique in Sir Peter Harpdon's End is as crude as it well could be, chiefly, as I have suggested, on account of the poet's indifference. Short scenes follow each other in rapid succession, and in the middle of the play there is a hiatus which is intelligible enough but destroys the dramatic continuity. These defects make it difficult, though not impossible, for stage presentation, but otherwise it would, I believe, survive the ordeal triumphantly. The opening of the play is admirably contrived. In a few deft strokes the character of Peter Harpdon is outlined, and we know that he has humour and understanding of men, and a tenderness coloured by a certain roughness of temper. All this is shown strictly by his relation to the action in which he is involved—there is not a line but helps the development of this. Then in perfectly natural sequence the action enables him in a speech of little more than twenty lines to define the circumstances from which it has sprung, and thus we have set before us at the outset the nature of the protagonist and the situation in relation to which we are to look for that nature's manifestation; and already it is clear, in the character of John Curzon, that the people among whom Harpdon is to move will be no less sharply stated and proved than himself. The construction of this opening could not well be more skilful or instinctively right. Then follows what at first seems to be a momentary lapse into the dramatic error of which I have spoken. In a long soliloquy Peter reveals directly his spiritual and mental attitude towards this action in which he is involved and indirectly the commentary of the poet himself upon that attitude. This in itself is perfectly legitimate, and supported, of course, by all the poets of whom Shakespeare is the spring, indeed by all the great dramatic poets of literature. The Greek chorus realizes this end as one of its essential functions no less clearly than do the soliloquies of Hamlet; and until the poets see once again the significance of this fact and adapt it to modern needs, refusing to have their authority usurped by theatrical showmen and their stage carpenters, they will continue to fail in bringing back their art to the theatre. But it must always be remembered that this choric element of the drama justifies itself only as long as it limits itself to the presentation of idea growing directly out of the action. When it allows digression and elaboration for their own sake, or the sake of some altogether extraneous idea, in short for any reason other than intensifying the fundamental idea which the progress of the action creates, it becomes undramatic and ceases to fulfil its only right purpose. It is at this point that the poets since the close of the Elizabethan age have misunderstood the necessities of drama, and in Peter Harpdon's soliloquy we suspect Morris for a moment of the same error. But careful examination of the speech itself proves the suspicion to be almost if not wholly unfounded. We find that there is nothing that is not the immediate result of his position, and the worst that can be said of it is that there are turns of thought which, although not dramatically irrelevant, are a little superfluous and do not heighten our perception. It is curious that in this speech there is evidence of external contemporary influence in manner such as is scarcely to be found elsewhere in the book. There is at least a suggestion of Browning in such lines as—

The first scene closes with a swift turn of action carried on correspondingly swift dramatic speech. Peter Harpdon is defending an English castle in Poictou. His antagonist is his cousin Lambert, who has misrepresented a circumstance of war to impugn Peter's loyalty to his cause, careful for his own purposes that the rumour shall reach the ears of Peter's lady, Alice. Peter has had no means of defending himself, and his soliloquy is the outcome of the suffering that he experiences at the thought of his wife's possible mistrust of him. As he finishes, his servant, Clisson, comes in again, saying that a herald has come from Lambert—

What says the herald of our cousin, sir?

CURZON. So please you, sir, concerning your estate, He has good will to talk with you.

SIR PETER. Outside, I'll talk with him, close by the gate St. Ives. Is he unarm'd?

CURZON. Yea, sir, in a long gown.

SIR PETER. Then bid them bring me hither my furr'd gown, With the long sleeves, and under it I'll wear, By Lambert's leave, a secret coat of mail.

He will also take an axe, one—as we should expect of Morris—'with Paul wrought on the blade'—

CURZON. How, sir! Will you attack him unawares, And slay him unarm'd?

SIR PETER. Trust me, John, I know The reason why he comes here with sleeved gown Fit to hide axes up. So, let us go.

Peter Harpdon is a Gascon knight, and in the next scene Lambert urges that this fact combined with expedience, for the French are in the ascendancy, should induce him to leave the English. Peter answers him at length but finishes in an aside—

Lambert accuses him then directly—

They flash out at each other and Lambert 'takes hold of something in his sleeve,' strikes at Peter with a dagger, and is taken. He is brought before Harpdon in the castle and sentenced—

Again we have the clear-cut delineation of character thrown up on a framework of simple and logical action which all the while is interesting as a means but not as an end. The blend of nobility and savagery in Peter's nature stands sharply contrasted with the meanness and merely dull cruelty of Lambert's. At this point the hiatus occurs. The next scene is in the French camp, and Sir Peter Harpdon is a prisoner before Guesclin and his officers, Lambert being one of them. The dramatic opposition of the situation to that which has immediately preceded it is admirable, but we need some explanation that is not made. Apart from this defect, however, Morris continues to build up his play with flawless instinct. Defeat had turned Lambert's cruelty into pitiful and cringing terror, whilst Peter at the moment of his power over his rival, although he had not spared him, had shown some mercy, as to one whom he despised. Now, with the shifting circumstance, the two prove themselves with unerring completeness. Defeat purges Peter Harpdon's nature of all its grosser parts, and he responds perfectly to the demands of tragic chance; whilst Lambert in his triumph reveals himself in all the degradation of a mean and wholly unheroic villainy. In both cases the development is logical, indeed inevitable, and yet it depends strictly upon the course of the action for its being. Already we know the natures of the men, and, given the event, can foresee their attitude with some certainty, but it needs the event itself to complete our understanding. Peter is not a coward nor lacking in nobility, yet when he hears that Lambert has come to him 'in a long gown' he knows what that means, and he makes no foolish boast of fearlessness, but frankly prepares himself with mail and axe. Now, before his judges, the same temper is evident. Quite simply, and with no blind defiance or pretence at indifference, he pleads for his life, not, as the squire says of him afterwards—

He states his case clearly, with dignity, yet earnestly. Clisson intercedes for him in a passage that outlines with precision yet another character, and Guesclin is sorry but obdurate; he must die. Then Lambert taunts him. He exults in the downfall of his enemy with a cruelty that is bestial yet calculated in every stroke, until his victim blenches. Then—

and Clisson breaks in—

This second speech of Clisson's is his last, and yet the tenderness and strength of the man are shown so definitely as to make him complete and living. He continues, asking Peter to forgive him for his share in his death—

and Peter makes his last utterance, full of passionate realization of the moment, yet chiming to his character consistently to the end—

He would not have them think that when he wept he did so because of Lambert's taunts. He was

and so up to the close, which has all the awe and terror but also the pity and exaltation of authentic tragedy—

The last scene, as just in dramatic instinct as the rest of the play, tells of the bearing of the news of Peter's death to the Lady Alice.

I have examined this play in some detail, and with a good many quotations, for two reasons. One, already stated, to show that Morris had an understanding of the nature of drama which is generally overlooked, and secondly, because it is a common thing to hear people to whom poetry is a matter of real importance say that they find Morris—for all his beauty—languid and lacking in power of concentration. If Sir Peter Harpdon's End be languid or anything but tense with concentrated emotion from beginning to end, then I confess my sense of values to be much awry. And, although he left the dramatic form, he did not lose this quality in his later work. He employed, for reasons which will be discussed later, a certain easy and decorative elaboration in much of his writing, but at the right moment in Jason, in the tales of The Earthly Paradise and in Sigurd the Volsung, he was master of the direct vitality and vibrating force that he first used in Sir Peter Harpdon's End and elsewhere when he needed them in this earliest volume, as in The Haystack in the Floods, with unquestionable control and vividness.

The few poems that have not been mentioned are the lyrical expressions of moods, snatches of song and swift little pictures in many colours that give their own peculiar pleasure as do all the fragmentary strokes of a great artist. They are exquisitely done, but they must be read, not described.

Several of the poems published in The Defence of Guenevere volume had already appeared, as has been said, in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine." In the same magazine Morris had also printed his first essays in prose romance. A comparison of these with the poems shows very clearly the value of that exaltation apart from the discovery, which finds, as I have suggested, its expression in the music or rhythmical pattern of verse. In more than one of these prose stories Morris uses a subject that differs in no fundamental quality from those used in many of the poems. The treatment shows the same tenderness, the same love of the earth, the same power of direct and vivid presentation of passion when it is needed, as in passages of Gertha's Lovers, and the same delight in colour and all beautiful things. And Morris uses his medium skilfully, and with a curiously personal touch; his prose has the same freshness and light as his verse. In short, we have here two groups of work from the same man, alike in temper, substance and treatment, and in control, the only difference being that of form. And that difference is everything, for in the form lies the visible evidence of the spiritual pressure at the moment of conception. There is no more stupid error than to censure one work of art because it lacks the qualities of another with which it has no point of contact. No sane person thinks less of, say, "Wuthering Heights," because it has not the poetic perfection of "Adonais." But the case of Morris's early prose romances is different. They are delightful to read, they are in themselves the treasurable expression of a fine spirit, yet they have in them nothing that is not to be found in the poems. That being so, it is inevitable that a close acquaintance with the poems should make us a little careless of these prose tales, for in the poems we have all the excellences that we find in the others, and we have added the rhythmic exaltation which is the light on the wings of poetry. Morris's fund of inventiveness was inexhaustible, but in his early prose it discovered no quality that peculiarly fitted itself to the medium; the inventiveness in the prose tales and the poems is the same, and there is, in consequence, no compensation in the one for the absence of the higher faculty of utterance that is found in the other. Morris realized this himself, and for the next thirty years created in verse. Nothing is further from my mind than to suggest that The Story of the Unknown Church and Lindenborg Pool, Gertha's Lovers and The Hollow Land and Svend and his Brethren, are other than beautiful expressions of a rare creative intelligence, but no clearer evidence of the essential difference between that which is poetry and that which is not could well be found than by setting side by side things so closely related in many ways, indeed in every way save one, as these stories and The Defence of Guenevere and King Arthur's Tomb, Rapunzel and The Wind, Sir Peter Harpdon's End and Shameful Death. Nor could anything be advanced more unanswerably supporting the contention that verse is the one unassailable medium for poetry.

Nine years were to pass before Morris published his next book, The Life and Death of Jason. The course of his life and the nature of his development in the meantime are discussed briefly in the following chapter.

III INTERLUDE

In 1859 Morris married Miss Jane Burden, of Oxford. To a man of his profound tenderness for all the simple and rational things of life, home was a symbol of the deepest significance. Homestead and homeland are words used constantly and lovingly in his writing. A man's home was, as he understood it, not merely a refuge from the serious business of life or a comfortable and convenient means of satisfying social requirements, but the temple of his daily worship. It should be at once a centre of his labours and an expression of himself. The application of the artist's understanding to daily conduct is not always possible, or of first importance, for it is the artist's function to persuade, not to compel; but such application is the logical outcome of true development that is not hindered by circumstance. We do not impugn Browning's sincerity either as a man or an artist because he mercilessly exposed the evils of Society and yet was a great diner-out. We feel, indeed, that he was of sounder judgment and a finer charity than Shelley, who not only exposed the evils, but also left society gasping whilst he went naked to his dinner or made his house the asylum for anybody incapable of managing his own affairs. But it is, on the other hand, an everlasting vindication of Byron's strange personality that the man who wrote 'The Isles of Greece' gave his life in the service of the cause that he sang. Morris's unchanging gospel was that man should have joy in his work, which meant that the results of his work would in themselves be beautiful. To accept anything that was unlovely on any terms short of compulsion would, in consequence, have been to proclaim the truth without insisting upon it by example. Had he done so his art might have lost none of its vitality, but by steadily refusing to do so he made the common charge of aloofness even less intelligible than it would otherwise have been. Being a customer in the world's market he was determined not to degrade the men by whom the market was supplied. If he could find no other solution, he would supply it himself.